


a young cool dude fiercely contends with alien robot purgatory (and maybe dies at the end)

by Samsinater



Category: Homestuck, Receiver (Video Game)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Anxiety, Experimental Style, Guns, Mild Fear/Depression, POV Dave Strider, POV First Person, Rated 'R' for 'Rambling'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-18
Updated: 2015-07-23
Packaged: 2018-04-09 20:13:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 31,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4362656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Samsinater/pseuds/Samsinater
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <span class="dave">so i went through hell</span>
</p><p>
  <span class="dave">like literally i had to go through some 'personal hell' shit just now. nbd</span>
</p><p>
  <span class="dave">nah but like seriously imagine silent hill only before you refine any of the details in your mind just stop once you register the creepy vibes and maybe also take it back a few notches cause there wasnt fog everywhere or memories of dead wives so much as a metric shitton of automated lil drones tryin to zap or shoot my ass while i looked for some goddamned cassette tapes</span>
</p><p>
  <span class="dave">also for all you know they succeeded and this isnt actually a personal memoir or some awe inspiring survival story</span>
</p><p>
  <span class="dave">for all you know its just me typin up what i can from my phone before i bleed the fuck out</span>
</p><p>
  <span class="dave">but i guess theres only one way for you to know huh?? so read on if you fuckin dare i guess</span>
</p><p>
  <span class="dave">idgaf i remain alive/dead either way</span>
</p><p> </p><p>(An experimental first-person story based on an indie game, and all the 'deep' character of the aloof sunglasses-wearing dork you know and love.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prologue + tape one

so im not really the best at storytelling or anything thats all up and hells of dramatic or what have you

i mean my friends used to tell me i was a motherfucking expert at rambling on and on about absolutely nothing and to be perfectly candid they were right

but so long as i got a story to tell i figured i might as well tell it by puttin it on the internet so it can be archived or some shit

some digital internet monkeys will come and take my words and make sure theyre safely stored on a server somewhere which basically means ill only be remembered so long as electricity is a thing but whatever

aint like i got a pen or paper around to record this shit anyway

fuck wouldnt that be incredibly superb and also a goddamn cliche

"dear diary today i almost died several times and also to keep the suspense maybe i actually DID die"

who knows???

is that a blood stain on the page or is it just ketchup???

if it is a bloodstain then was it from a mortal injury?? and if its ketchup then was the burger + fries good???

but of course since i am actually just sending this from my phone you wont see any ketchup or blood on the screen because thats not how the fucking internet works

so uh lets get this shit started i guess

if that prologue wasnt good enough for you then prepare to be disappointed asshole

im only one dude and if i make some obvious typos or grammatical/syntactical fuckups or even just dont sound like im making a lot of sense maybe its because im on the floor in a growing puddle of my own blood with cracked sunglasses and less than an hour left to live or even write all this shit down so cut me some slack will you???

i mean again as far as you know thats only a possibility and i very well could just be totally bullshitting you because if i just told you straightup that i lived/died then there wouldnt be much point to reading the rest of this shit would there??

anyway enough introspective self-inspection i dont want to start mentally masturbating here

lets get this show on the road

 

* * *

 

i woke up in an unfamiliar place

thats pretty much how all suspenseful n dramatical stories start anyway right?

generic but anxious main character john johnson wakes up in the middle of buttfuck nowhere with no idea how he wound up there or why

might not even be in the middle of nowheresville usa it could actually just be in carls basement because carl is a psychopath and he finally goddamn snapped

point is we dont know yet what we do know is that im awake and already starting to get antsy because FUCK

where am i???

how did i get here???

why is there a pristine fucking tapedeck with headphones sitting next to me???

btw i woke up next to a tapedeck with headphones

thats kind of important but i didnt know it right away so neither should you so go ahead and forget that i mentioned its importance

just keep in mind that its there

"what the fuck" is pretty much the first thing to pop outta my mouth as i sit up and take in my surroundings

i guess i should describe my surroundings before telling you that though

fuck it im not going back to change anything i wrote im just gonna keep going forward and write shit in as necessary

so anyway when i woke up it wasnt like i had a pounding headache or a blindfold that i had to gingerly remove in the remote fear of not being immediately killed by boogeyfuck jeff the smiling slenderman or whatever bullshit creepy madeup fictional asshole that might come to mind in this situation

like i was wearing sunglasses that made it a little hard to see but they werent really that much of a hindrance and by the way fuck you if youre one of those people who frowns on other people wearing sunglasses indoors, its my body and ill do with it what i damn well fucking please do you got that??

if i want to get a man abortion or expose my nipples in public or put darkened pieces of plastic on my face then you better believe that i am going to do those things and that the only one who can judge me for doing them is god

anyway despite my sunglasses i was still capable of registering the dark as hell environment around me because guess what when a guy wears sunglasses long enough he gets used to them and also it doesnt take a dude NOT wearing sunglasses to understand that there is a distinct lack of lighting around him

something i didnt immediately realize was just how chunky and block-like everything was around me but well get to that later and itll be totally relevant and cool and have a dramatic reveal if i remember to write it that way so look forward to that i guess

anyway all i knew was that i was in this dark little number of a room which at first kinda reminded me of a james bond video game i played once? not that i could even name it

i was never a huge fan of that being a video game series anyway it always seemed too far removed from what the movies had going for them

basically i was in like this corridor with little white lights sparsely populating the places where the floor met the walls and in their cold n distant glow i realized these halls were a pleasant light green

THATS what i acknowledged first in this situation so props to me for being such an incredibly observant motherfucker

also when i say little lights i want you to understand that these things were like goddamn christmas lights and each of them was at least five feet away from one another meaning i really had to squint while my eyes adjusted to this low light bullshit so if nothing else please understand that it was dark as hell in this place and that because i didnt bring my fucking carrots or nightvision goggles with me i wasnt used to it JUST yet

speaking of do you remember the tapedeck i mentioned earlier?

yeah

i only noticed that shit when i first stood up and thank fucking GOD i did not step on the actual tapedeck itself like a goddamn moron

i literally never would have had a single chance whatsoever of escaping my current predicament without that thing so bear in mind that regardless of whether i live or die at the end of this story this tapedeck is what kept me going

and i only knew that because after i stood up and noticed the lil bump of the headphone cord under my foot i bent over and picked it up

lo and behold this sucker already had a tape in it

"fucking sweet" i jived exuberantly to myself "i get to listen to some ill beats or maybe just a creepy message full of static about how i did something in a past life to deserve this shit"

except as it turns out it was neither

it was just some guy with a voice that honestly was pretty pleasant and relaxing to listen to

like he wasnt morgan freeman because NOBODY but morgan freeman himself is morgan freeman

but this guy was like a solid 8/10 in terms of having a voice that was solidly ok to listen to

and he gave me a message that pretty much went like this:  


"if you are listening to this tape, it means you have survived the mindkill. previous attempts to listen to this tape would have found it blank, but now it contains immediate instructions of your difficult path forward. this is the time that we have prepared for. take a moment now to find your firearm."

then it paused for me to actually do that and while it did i guess this is a good time to throw in a mention of "oh yeah by the way it turned out i had a FUCKING GUN sitting next to me too"

thank our lord and savior that i didnt step on that either and wind up shooting myself in the fucking foot like the pathetic piece of trash that i very easily could have been

or at least thank god that i didnt do it at that moment!! drama suspense drama!!!

no expense will be spared in terms of not letting anyone reading this know whether i actually survive this shit until we are at the end of the story so you better get goddamn used to it

also while were on the subject ill be honest with you

im not really the kinda guy who likes guns all that much

those things are noisy as hell and have ridiculously limited ammunition and are stupidly capable of killing whoevers wielding one if they so much as hold it the wrong way

you know what doesnt have limited ammunition? swords motherfucker

idgaf what kind of apocalypse im in, if i get to choose my weapon its gonna be a goddamn sword

even if its a dull piece of shit itll still be sharper than pretty much any blunt object you can just find lying around which is already a direct plus in terms of being an effective melee weapon

and also i mean its not like you cant sharpen it once it does get dull because all you really need for that is a concrete slab which cities like the one i lived in generally have plenty of, so basically swords are the perfect weapon especially in the suburbs and this is an indisputable fact

unfortunately i dont get the benefit of choice and ill let you know here and now that i dont come across any highly-convenient swords any later in this story either

its pretty much this gun only or fuckall and thats something i have to come to terms with as i do absolutely nothing but dick around in a world where im literally always incredibly likely to die

but we will get to my mortality in due time so for the moment please apply a firm grip to your equines and allow this story run its natural course

anyway after the pause the tape kept going like

"some of you will be familiar with firearms from our training camp, but more recent receivers will have focused on mindtech in order to survive the mindkill event. in either case, please take a moment to confirm that the firearm you have been issued is in working order and has one full magazine. (it did have a magazine btw that WASNT full like a fucking ripoff of a letdown of the goddamn century up in this bitch and while i totally fumbled with it trying to get a good look at it in the dark at least i didnt shoot myself in the process) you have also been issued one tape deck with headphones and two double a batteries. once you have checked your equipment, leave the safe cell, keep moving, and be careful. the threat will have dreamed killdrones near your location."

if youre wondering how the fuck i remembered that word for word its because i didnt

i just kept the cassette tape around with me and im fast enough at writing shit down on my phone (read: texting) to basically be a legitimate fucking scribe in a bonafide court of law so go me in that respect

its why if i AM dying of bloodloss at the end of this that i so cockily think i at least have a reasonable shot at typing all this up in only an hour

im just one cocky sunnuvabitch like that but at the end of the day its not like its an unfounded belief

but anyway this fucking tape was coming at me with all kinds of shit i didnt immediately understand, like seriously if you think you dont know what the fuck this guy is talking about imagine what i was going through as i found my ass smack dab in the middle of it i mean

mind tech?

mind KILL??

kill DRONES???

right off the bat i knew i was either in some fucking reality television shit with maybe nerf guns to fight off cardboard targets while my family laughed at my stupidly incompetent ass from the couch in front of the telly or maybe somehow shit actually got real but also in the fakest real sense possible because what the fuck do you even do to check if something is real anyway??

for all i know im not actually writing any of this down im just sucking my own dick and quietly weeping to myself as my subconscious faintly registers how fucked up it is

i mean i hope not but how can i be sure?

how can YOU be sure???

maybe we are all in the matrix except while were plugged in our real bodies are just doing self fellatio/cunnilingus for the amusement of literally whoever

the point is we dont know we can only assume that shits real at any given moment

and at this moment in the story i was in a dark hall with these measly christmas lights with absolutely no sense of belonging to my name (and also i think i woke up in the corner or at least near it because i remember it branched off in two directions with the right just stopping dead like thirty feet down so it could head left while my current corners left bled out both left and right at its own end about forty feet away so at least i had options on where i could go)

and in this dark hall ive got a gun with a maybe third-full magazine and a tapedeck straight out of the fuckin eighties with some headphones that look like someone swiped em off a goddamned airline service with how flimsy they are

if the man from the tape is to be believed then there are also of all things two batteries in the tapedeck but i decided not to question it or check for myself because it played the tape just fine and i didnt want to inadvertently drop the batteries on the ground or stumble around looking for them at that point in time

its worth mentioning that by now my hands were already getting a little grubby and sweaty which was completely disrespectful and uncool of them

danger has not yet even poked its head around the fucking corner to flirtatiously wink at me from afar and here i am starting to shake in my sneakers as if i had just seen a g-g-g-GHOST!!!

my pits meanwhile have just begun their personal agenda of dropping MAD amounts of bodily fluids aka dank milky sweat which if you didnt know biology class says is a thing that exists and is excreted from the pits and genitals of any dude or dudette whos alive and real so thanks science for that comforting knowledge

"fuck me" is honestly probably a thing i say at some point therein because the atmosphere is both light and also fucking thick and intense as hell but i say it quietly in case anything might hear me because FUCK ME maybe im actually just a teensy tiny bit scared ok??

i dont even know what the fuck a killdrone IS or what it looks like because i havent even taken two steps from where i woke up but i start to get the outrageous suspicion that it isnt something designed to give me hugs and fucking lollipops

and now heres the part where i could start describing the fact that i knew fuckall about guns when i first picked up the one i woke up next to but im not sure how relevant it would be to go into torturous amounts of detail about how unbelievably uneducated i was when it came to operating a firearm of any kind or just how imbecilic of me it was to believe that maybe id figure it out at a reasonable pace

all you need to know reading this is that it was shaped like an L-block from tetris like pretty much the most basic kind of gun you can possibly imagine and honestly im surprised it didnt have "GUN" written on the side with like a backwards g or some shit but at least i still rolled a respectable fucking 13 on my knowledge check to identify it

this gun of mine had a single "magazine" (thats the thing that holds all the bullets for you gun novices out there) that when i first found it held a whopping six bullets in it, which i expertly counted using my mad basic arithmetic skills so on that note id like to give a shout out to mrs schwartz from the fourth grade for making sure i got the same basic mandatory public school education that literally every other snotnosed drooling nine year old got, she really did me a lifelong solid there

on top of these dope truths there was this little slidey button sticking out of the side that changed the gun from firing one bullet at a time to firing ALL the bullets inside within the span of maybe two seconds -- AT MAX CAPACITY

but of course it wasnt labelled and overall gave absolutely no indication of what the fuck it did so when i gave this gun a test fire just to make sure the stupid thing worked surprise surprise it wasnt on the "one bullet at a time" mode

(if youre too dense to read between the lines that means i fired every single bullet in the gun with one pull of the trigger and also nearly gave myself a fucking concussion with the recoil i wasnt used to because OH YEAH ITS A GUN and also I HAVE NEVER OPERATED A FIREARM OF ANY KIND BEFORE IN MY FUCKING LIFE so i stupidly did not prepare myself for that shit. feel free to leave hateful comments in the comments section below about how you knew how to operate a gun before the age of three and ill make especially sure to not read or give a shit about any of them ok thanks)

"oopsie FUCKING daisy" i gurgle energetically to the empty air as i slap on my trademark shit eating grin to replace the neutral expression i had been previously charading around with "i sure hope this silly little blunder of mine doesnt lead to me slowly bleeding to death in the dark like a miserable sack of meat!!"

basically i am the uncontested king of starting off personal stories with immense levels of success so dont even bother scanning this sentence for sarcasm because you just are not going to find any


	2. tape two

oh hey youre still here

thanks for still reading this friend!

would you just look at that genuine welcoming intro i made for you dont you feel so fucking enthused to still be reading this excruciating drivel

maybe you only accidentally clicked the button to take you to part two of "dave strider struggles with fake real life guest starring fully functional gun and deadly deadly killer robots" but fuck it

youre here now so lets just keep this gravy train arollin

as you may recall at the end of the first chapter from literally seconds ago i was in the corner of a darkened green hallway with some plain christmas lights sprucin the place up and a freshly smoking gun in my hand

i dont think it was actually smoking if ill be honest but there were seven new bullet holes in the wall just in front of me

"but wait dave" i hear some of you more observant motherfuckers wheezing in objection at your screens "didnt you say your magazine had only six bullets?? cant you keep your fucking story straight you inconsistent piece of trash????"

well jokes on you asshole because as it turns out a number of guns have a thing called a chamber in them

and thats pretty much something i had to start stringing together in my own mind once i realized this shit had a mostly low chance of not being legit

like by now there was at least a 70% chance that everything here was actually happening but idk maybe the gun and the bullets were fake then and maybe theyre still fake now

point being i had heard people talk about guns and gun parts before

i lived in texas for christs sake it was pretty hard to go a single day without seeing or hearing SOMETHING that related to a gun in some way

like honestly it was unreal just how many people got people birthday cakes shaped like piles of guns where i lived just as it was unreal that i attended the parties where this fucking happened

anyway i had picked up some lingo over the years despite my never handling a gun before and i guess it was enough to help me out because oops fucking spoiler alert: i DIDNT die within the first five fucking minutes of waking up

after those five minutes though theres pretty much no guarantee for my survival so dont be surprised if i abruptly tell you i broke my ankle falling off of something or that i got shot by something that saw me before i saw it

like haha jokes on you again dipshit i got you at least SOMEWHAT invested in this story but the investment was a total bust because i dont survive and was never meant to!!

anyway enough with the mortality jokes yall are probably getting tired of them anyway

i know i am

so yeah there was a bullet in the chamber which i did not even think to check like the goddamn moron i am but fucking sue me for having never once latched onto the belief any time prior that i could not live my life without guns becoming a necessary part of it

go fucking figure that they do because i get transported to alien fucking purgatory

which i realize you might be questioning because why the fuck would i have gone to this purgatory and not you??

well fuck you im writing this shit down as a testament to myself anyway like the narcissistic texan trash that i am

hell maybe you DID go to purgatory and now heres a chance to share the knowledge

hit me up with a comment in the comments section i guess if you want to tell me about how you also got chased down by some fucking battlebots and either did or did not survive to tell the tale

i wont respond to them and tbh i probably wont even read them but at least youll feel like your life/death was not for nothing either

ANYWAY so back to the math 1 chamber bullet + 6 magazine bullets + one dumbass motherfucker holding the trigger of the gun for 0.5 seconds = 7 bullet holes in the wall before me

i hope i didnt lose you in all that complex mathemagical equating because if i did then im sorry little billy but youll have to repeat the third grade

do not pass go do not collect your allowance and especially do not bitch to the teacher because they honestly dont care and neither do i

now i dont know about the rest of you or how steely you are when it comes to being thrust into situations where you are holding and firing a gun for the first time but i nearly pissed my pants at the sound of the gun alone

nearly mind you because again

texas

guns were present all over the place and i HAD faintly heard some being fired once or twice just by staying home in my apartment

hearing them directly in front of me however as they discharge seven different bullets in under a second besides almost breaking my wrist backwards with the force of LITERAL EXPLOSIONS as these pieces of metal fly out of this larger assortment of metal parts in my hand

well it tends to leave a guy a little less than courageous or totally in control of his bladder

i did not actually expel any amount of urine from my gigantic but irrelevant wang upon firing the gun but i DID drop the gun immediately afterwards and clutch my fucking chest like the scrawny goddamn wimp i am

groping around my tshirt to see if my heart is still there but my useless goddamn ribcage is in the way and my hand is trembling as adrenaline pumps through my worthless veins at a scientifically calculated value of approximately eleventeen jillion miles per second so FUCK

it takes me some time to fully realize and take into account the fact that i actually did not just shoot myself and therefore im actually still pretty lucky

unfortunately i now have fuckall for seriously defending myself with and all thanks to my own fucking stupidity

"maybe it wont be so bad??" i incoherently mumble to myself while mournfully tittering and nervously punching myself in the face "maybe i can still take on these kill drones without a gun???"

AS IF motherfucker you probably woke up with a gun next to you because you more or less objectively NEEDED that gun which means the same probably went for all the bullets you just mercilessly hammered into the fucking drywall over there

and then i realized that just because i was out of bullets didnt necessarily make my gun useless

im not exactly talking about pistol-whipping my enemies either although that wasnt immediately out of the question

its just that i began to recall most guns are not single use only

disposable guns is a vaguely hilarious concept and borderlands 2 did it well but it had no place here

all i had to do was hope there were some fucking bullets just lying around somewhere waiting for me to conveniently find and pick them up before hamfistedly stuffing them into my gun and pretending it would defend me on the sole principle that it was there for me

and heres where i wont blame you for not necessarily believing any of the shit that i say because upon bravely tripping over myself down the right corridor and then down the hallway it bled out to on the left

i found some fucking bullets on the ground

at this point i dont entirely know if im being fucked with or if im on camera or what but i start backing up and giving middle finger salutes to pretty much every feasible direction around me

if im being filmed then theyre going to have to censor that shit so i hope it was fucking worth it mister hypothetical television show producer man

anyway after poking my head around the corner to establish that the end of THIS hallway goes left and right with the left stopping short and heading off right like ten feet down (and although i didnt know it at the time it just went left directly after that to neatly hook up with the space off to the right of the left corridor at the original corner i woke up in so THERES some mental fucking mapping for you. also mystery fucking solved as to where those directions lead to so try not to work yourself into a tizzy worrying about it now) while the right goes up some green ass paneled stairs into what looks like a totally grey room

following this round of poorly structured observations which honestly i dont intend on making any clearer so dont ask, i sit down and take a deep breath or twelve and start to think to myself "ok sure why the fuck not"

and i pick up all the bullets that are sitting in their neat little pile so i can inspect them and i dont know make sure that they are REAL FUCKING BULLETS!!! because obviously a man who has never before worked with guns in his life is going to know the goddamn difference anyway

i dont know what to say about them other than that they were silvery little cylinders that were flat on one side and all smoothly rounded and slightly duller in color on the other and maybe each as wide around as my pinky

of course i am something of a skinny ass white boy aka a thin milky coconut slice of vanilla so take that measurement how you will

i discover that there are only five bullets here so im only worse off from my piss poor start by two and thus i decide to be 5/7ths less disappointed in myself than a minute ago

it takes me some time and some proper fucking fiddling around to get myself situated with the gun that i actually didnt go back to pick up until i found these new bullets but i come to reason that maybe the little slidey button thats sticking out of the right side of my gun is the so-called "safety"

i will say here and now that at the beginning of this firearm investigation i was not aware of the fact that some guns do not even have safeties or that this was one of those guns but i very quickly found out after pushing it and giving the trigger another firm test squeeze in the hopes that absolutely nothing would eject itself from the barrel before watching a new bullet sink itself into the fucking floor just beside my foot

and i mean

i had worked so hard to get the bullets into the magazine and make sure they were facing the right direction and also make sure the magazine was going inside the gun the correct way all in the fucking dark, which is besides the fact that i had to pull back the fucking slide after like solid MINUTES of groping this gun trying to figure out how to chamber a single goddamn bullet

and THIS is my reward??? FUCK

the gun is once again dropped and if i had still been the stringy teenager i was some years ago i might have started sobbing on the spot just from being alone and scared and confused and getting some seriously uncouth negative reinforcement from this loud POS gun

i was however still in my early twenties when this happened as with right now while i write this so i bottled that shit up and kept a brave face for myself and maybe also those theoretical cameras

couldnt let them witness a cool dude like myself start to break down or cry you know?

because then people might think that shedding tears is ok or something when obviously it just fucking isnt

if i was going on live television then i was going to do it while being as respectable of a fucking role model to the unbroken archetypes of society as i possibly could i solemnly swore that much to myself

so once i was done feeling sorry for myself and being vaguely startled by an inanimate albeit stupidly deadly object i began to realize that this not-a-safety thing changed whether it fires one bullet or as many bullets as are left in the fucking gun because this time only one bullet had come out

(you may recall i pointed out the buttons functionality in the previous chapter but i wanna remind you that i pointed it out as a guy whos writing his story from the chronological end of it. i only just figured it out at this point in the story and honestly im still pretty proud of myself for it. i could have been WAY worse off for not fucking putting two and two together to figure out that my gun could only fire one bullet per squeeze of the trigger now)

it was a fresh theory to slap onto my minimal understanding of this gun and i decided that if "semi-automatic" was ever going to mean something to me as a term relevant to myself or the gun in my life then now was the time to make it so

in related news i vowed to myself at this moment to never point this fucking gun at myself and to never push that button again

as far as i was concerned now that it stuck out on the left instead of the right it was fucking STAYING that way and would never be reversed so long as i lived 

maybe i break that vow later as i consider dramatically ending it all or after running into too many bullets and deciding that praying while spraying is a valid option but lets not get ahead of ourselves here

chronologically im still a fucking tyke taking babies first shots with this firearm and i make that vow to myself so fucking hard like you wouldnt believe

rock solid like a goddamn compressed chunk of carbon aka a fucking diamond

diamonds are of course actually fragile as shit and only "hard" in that you can only scratch a diamond with another diamond which i know thanks to mr rasmussen from my ninth grade science class but i didnt care when i made this stupid fucking vow ok

i was already running on pure fucking adrenaline at this point

just these brain juices pumping through my veins with the intent to just up and replace my blood entirely when i had not even CAUGHT WIND OF real danger or trouble yet but i gave no fucks

it came to be that i was fucking ENTRENCHED in this shit and i did not intend to unentrench myself until i was certain i could get away with doing so on top of staying alive

so once all that vowing and trenching business was out of the way i picked up my gun whilst noting how goddamn sweaty my palms had gotten and decided to hold it with both hands from then on

i was pretty sure that was a thing i had seen people do in tv shows and movies before and it made enough sense that if i didnt want to inadvertently smash my own skull in with recoil i should probably put as much of a grip on this thing as i possibly can

so loaded up with a grand total of four bullets in this gun i took a few cautious steps up those stairs i mentioned earlier

and ill be honest i nearly fell right the fuck back down those stupid things with the way i was shaking and sweating

guns are fucking scary ok and so is waking up in a green goddamn hallway with some fucking movie theater lights being your only source of feasible vision while being given a tape in a tape deck that wastes no time in alluding to the fact that you will probably die if you dont master the use of a gun BEFORE finding a valid enemy to use it on

eventually i work my way up these stairs and i notice between the separate slats towards the top that theres like a window giving me a view of this factory floor (and directly above which is the fucking doorway these stairs were leading to but i saw the window first alright)

and although i say factory i dont mean there were like conveyor belts or mechanical arms or any shit like that

there were just kind of these huge boiler tanks?? like just four of them in total where two were directly in front of me under this wide walkway the aforementioned doorway went out onto and the other two were faintly visible off to the left and going past the first two in a pattern of placement that was basically an s block from tetris

you probably did not start reading this to hear me compare everything to tetris but tetris is a very basic concept and i want to make sure as many people as possible understand the fucking shape these goddamn boiler tanks were in alright??

at the end of the day it was SOMETHING industrial and i did not like the looks of it but what fucking choice did i have

sure maybe i could have gone down that other hallway but i didnt want to think about that shit and as it so happens there was a damn good reason for it

that reason being that through the doorway i suddenly started looking through on like this raised railless walkway above the "factory" floor and above the tanks was what looked SUSPICIOUSLY like a cassette tape

in fact it looked very much like the one i still had in my tapedeck which was currently stuffed in my pocket

it was red and white and thats really all there is to say on the matter because if you dont know what a cassette tape is or looks like then im not sure how you are even capable of reading this with how young and fucking spoiled your ass is

anyway gigantic prank or television entertainment or not i figured i may as well inspect this other tape because either its a joke and my actions will have no lasting consequence and i can do whatever the fuck i feel like without fear of lasting harm or its real and these tapes are my only chance of figuring out anything whatsoever about my predicament and possibly even getting the fuck out of it

now i dont remember what exactly i had been fearing when i first saw this tape on the ground some short distance ahead of me but i fucking BOOKED IT to get that shit

i think it might have been because there was another doorway all the way across the platform that was really impossibly dark inside in comparison to this industrial room which was practically BATHED in lights when compared to the one fucking millimeter bulbs where i had just come from

just as well because once i almost fell over myself trying to get this fucking tape off the ground i dashed right the fuck back to the stairs and in the process nearly threw my worthless ass down all of them to very possibly wind up on the ground with a broken neck like a goddamn asshole

but at least i got a fucking outdated piece of technology to make the risks all worth it!!

so once i managed to get back to the bottom of those stairs WITHOUT dying horribly so i could sit in the now familiar hallway i popped the tape in and that same voice from before started dishing out a whole new message

"you see reality painted in shades of black, but beyond your world is another, bathed in radiant light. we have reached out to you with a warning; if you are able to hear our message you are one of the few that we can help -- we call you receivers. the receiver who is speaking these words was chosen because he is able to hear us with exceptional clarity. with time, you too could learn this mindtech, but time is not something we have. there is a threat to everyone on your planet, and they have been weakening your mind through your media, lowering your natural defenses. the coming attack is unavoidable; all we can do is prepare."

once again i find myself utterly baffled by the shit thats being spewed at me but like the fucking gullible little sucker i am i decided to actually listen to what this guy had to say rather than just write it off as bullshit you might hear in a movie about the dystopian scifi futurepast of yesteryear

again i considered the logistics of all this shit just being one huge goddamned prank but some inner voice of my own made me question why it couldnt be real

maybe society is actually so shitty that i am NOT in the real fucking world?? that the media actually literally WAS harmful to me and everyone the fuck else on earth????

this is still something i have trouble fully accepting but at least i STARTED to come to terms with it with these first two stupid tapes

"fuck it" i grunted with some kinda ridiculous level of suddenly taking this shit seriously because maybe just maybe my life actually depended on it now "i have a gun and a tape deck and i might as fucking well make use of them both"

and thats pretty much where shit started to get legitimately real


	3. tape three

after i got that second tape i dunno man some kinda resolve started fucking forging itself in my gut

like... i am GOING to survive this shit whether i like it or not and that is the fucking TRUTH

i will not take the extensive liberty of reminding you that i very well might have been wrong here but this is at least what i thought at the time

anyhow i had a gun and i had a mission so what the fuck else did i have to occupy my time with??

im sure some of you would suggest that i beat off and thats probably something i could have gotten away with letting myself doing if i wasnt suddenly starting to take life seriously

plus for the first time in my life my "purpose" was pretty fucking clear cut so i had that going for me

gone now were the days of worrying about things like paying off student loans or whether the economy would crash or even whether i would die alone

i mean it was pretty obvious that i was now absurdly likely to die alone especially if you consider that i could have been/flat out could BE in a fucking coma or some other trippy mental bullshit but at least it felt a little less uncertain for a change

i had a simple motive and a relatively simple means of achieving it -- or so i fucking thought

(and thats not me just being all dramatic again or making hinty implications about how the story ends thats a legitimate statement right there)

to spare you some boring details i just decided to scour this industrial room for absolutely anything that might in any way be beneficial or detrimental to my physical or mental health

all i really discovered of interest was that this room had four tall sturdy pillars holding up the ceiling + this walkway, and also this walkway had some more stairs only these were fully contained within the room and allowed me to explore the floor of this place without snapping my skinny ankles by tryna jump off the walkway and onto the floor

there were also big segmented windows on both sides of the room where there werent any doorways but ill tell you all about what i thought about the outside later because as of this moment in the story nothing registered beyond how dark it was outside and how bright it was inside

it was a long process as i checked the same spots twice and sometimes even three times but overall it probably did not take more than five minutes because it was a pretty small room all things considered

like maybe 50 feet by 50 feet by i dont know a height of 25 or 30 feet

approximately 62,500 shittily thought out cubic units of space to work with

thanks obama

anyway jokingly blaming the american president for american problems aside i managed to find some bullets in this room (only 8 so dont get too excited) and of all fucking things a flashlight

david e strider was just loading the fuck up on absolutely everything his young rambunctious little ass was gonna need to take on the so called "kill drones" including but not limited to a means of disabling them from a distance and a tool capable of lighting things up in a small area

of course thats when i started to harbor the fear that these drones could maybe SEE or even fucking HEAR me and so firing a gun or waving a flashlight around seemed at least as likely to expedite my death as push it back on my personal calendar

"oh well" i sighed glumly and tried to ignore the oppressive weight my sudden onset chronic depression was using to bear down on me "i guess thats why ive been cutting myself and playing loud rock and telling my parents that they dont understand me"

nah i was still way too hyped up on my own adrenaline to even THINK sad thoughts let alone be seriously depressed by them

at best i was just getting a little worried because like "its always calm before the storm" and honestly fuck whoever came up with that expression

i really did not need to be running around and thinking that the only thing the peace around me could possibly indicate was how incredibly likely it was that something was about to take it away

anyway once i felt satisfied that i had thoroughly looked around exactly ONE room i finally acknowledged the elephant in said room

that is to say the two doorways on opposite ends on the ground level

i had been as careful as possible to avoid them and anything that might be behind them but i was still catching glimpses of what lay beyond before i blushed and turned my cheek so i had no choice but to finally acknowledge them for what they really were, in other words two separate means of getting the fuck out of here and moving on with my furiously righteous quest that i started like nine minutes ago

the floor doorway that was on the same wall as the walkway doorway i entered from had another set of green stairs headed up just past it and frankly that was all i needed to see to know i was not heading that way any time soon

i had already dealt with TWO sets of stairs here and did not plan on tackling a third so knowing that the only other two doors in this room were both up on a walkway that i could only reach via some fucking stairs i gave those doorways a shaky adrenaline-fueled middle finger and went for the doorway on the opposite wall

over there it spilled out onto this really wide kinda balcony area with some tall blank ass pillars and two squarish lamps between em on the left side and a long mostly flat wall with like some indented trapezoidal patterns that formed big squares on the right

at the far end of this balcony was another doorway that led to a whole nother dark room i did not yet feel prepared for even WITH my new flashlight so as i took note of the lone doorway breaking up the classy monotony of the right wall i decided to give that exploratory angle a spin instead

as i approached i started to hear some soft and constant whirring noises like maybe the mechanical purr of a delightful little robotic kitten and frankly i dont know why the fuck i let myself start believing that kinda shit was something i should waste brainpower on because instead of thinking "hey maybe these sounds of motors and gears are from those very possibly lethal killdrones ive been hearing about" i just kind of dumbly wandered in front of the open doorway to check it out firsthand

if you didnt expect my ass to stumble in on the sight of a fucking killdrone then honestly youre even more retarded than i was at that moment in time because i sure as hell DID stumble in on a killdrone and as i did so time seemed to slow to a motherfucking crawl before my very sunglasses

i was lucky enough to have walked in front of the doorway while it was facing away from me so i had a good few seconds to let my mind register the fact that standing still is an incredibly stupid thing to do while within visible range of an active turret

however in the time that it took me to understand that i was NOT looking at any form of kitten this goddamn killdrone turret thing turned its camera towards me and gave me only the slightest amount of time to additionally comprehend the idea that it had a camera on it which emitted a blue light wherever it was looking -- until it saw me at least because then it turned fucking yellow, an act which coincided with it ceasing all movements as it stared me the fuck down

thankfully whatever genetic defect deers have that prevents them from moving when a bright light is shining in their eyes striders simply do not which may or may not be a direct result of their naturally grown sunglasses but lets avoid the specifics for now

i ran the FUCK back the way i came as soon as i saw yellow and for all i knew i had just evaded a barrage of bullets by a mere fraction of a second (which honestly was not at all wrong of me to think)

hoo fucking BOY were my breaths shallow and quick and again the true dangers of my situation had not yet even come out to play

they were still silently observing me from behind the blinds in that old abandoned house only now one of them decided to knock sharply on the glass to get my attention

well you fucking got it buddy and thats why i skedaddled as soon as i so much as looked in your general direction

now seeing as theyre finally a thing i encountered in this story i might as well tell you at some length what these motherfuckers look like and how they operate

bear in mind this is from personal experience with handling and disabling these things so ive had my fair share of deactivated versions of these motherfuckers to EXTENSIVELY inspect and try to understand

so to start with imagine a rectangular box

actually no imagine a square box but instead of being a cube its only a square on the top and bottom while all the sides are long rectangles and also the tops of those rectangles are angled on two opposite sides so you get terms like rhombus and trapezoid hopping aboard the description wagon but without any sense of where exactly theyre actually supposed to be

and then jutting out of the bottom of this very basic but difficult to describe shape is basically the same shape but without that bullshit angling or in other words a squat square-shaped box

thats the fucking base of these things and this base is feces brown in color all the way around

jutting impudently out of this base are four little metallic legs with i think black rubber stops on the bottom?? probably to stop them from scooting away whenever they shoot at something so nothing to fault the designers on there

directly on top of this base however is the actual turret itself and let me tell you that shit is scary when you dont immediately understand what it is that you are even fucking looking at

there is turquoise and more brown and some fucking flaming orange at the back and honestly it looks like a six year old chose the color palette for this thing but a fucking military engineer had to make it all work somehow so he just drank some scotch and sat down and fucking DID IT in one night of work

as far as i have come to understand these electronic/robotic monstrosities the turquoise shape is where the actual mechanical works for the gun are because sticking just out of a metal rectangular prism directly beside the turquoise is always a thin metal tube which has an opening roughly the size of a bullet and which tends to make me very nervous whenever its pointed toward me even if the turret is as dead as my bullets can make it

attached to the left side (or right if youre engaging one in a highly inadvisable staring contest) and just above the aforementioned tube is a simple little brown box with a lens and a light on the front which is without a doubt its camera aka its robotic eye aka hal 9000 aka big brother is watching

anywhere it looks will be this little blue grid of at least 40 squares all aligned to make a somewhat larger medium sized rectangle and i guess however these fuckers were built made that light a necessity because its never NOT there if the camera is functioning so... whatever science and technology i guess you just know how to make a robots vision VISIBLE

actually thanks for that its really saved my skin a few times by letting me know whether these things could actually see me or not and thats pretty important

anyway at the back of the gun barrel or what have you is this orange box with a closed feed and i call it a feed because every time ive shot this orange box it pretty much prevented the turret from firing more than one round

scientifically this has led me to believe this is where the ammo or maybe even ammo belt is stored and also that its bullets are not compatible with my own so any attempts made by me to reload these things with my gun will have the opposite intended effect (but thats good because it makes me less likely to die)

i neglected to mention the little dark green exhaust pipe at the top of the turqoise shape or the exact metallic mounting of the turret onto the base but honestly these things dont matter because shooting those parts does nothing to damage the turret in any significant way whatsoever

what matters is that these turrets spin clockwise nonstop with a blue light until you enter their field of view at which point they stop turning and look at you with a yellow light

now i hate to give spoilers but since im already telling you about things i only find out in the future i may as well add that this yellow light will actually turn to red after maybe a second of being yellow

this is when the bastard of a demonic lil robot begins to shoot bullets at you

you might think i would only know this if ive been shot by one so to maintain a lack of clarity regarding my potential death ill play my factual information card and rephrase that as "this is when it begins TRYING to shoot bullets at you"

more on that later though because right now in the story im panting and sweating against a patterned fucking wall trying to give myself some level of legitimate encouragement about how im going to take this thing down

i said earlier that the adrenaline in me was hyping me up but at this point it was just making me too jittery to sit still and too anxious to stop nervously sweating

"maybe i can just lie down against this wall here and take a little break" i start to silently reason to myself as if i could fight the adrenaline in my veins by staying still so easily but it is then that i accidentally drop on myself the knowledge bomb of what everything looks like PAST the balcony ledge which is now directly in front of me

beyond this ledge i see tall city buildings off in the far unreachable distance and not a single one of them has escaped the shroud of the darkness the all consuming night sky has wrapped around them but despite this some of them try and for their part even succeed in making themselves known by shining lights out their windows and from blinking antennae standing tall atop their roofs like survivors of the apocalypse trying to flag down the military jets so theyll come rescue them before they nuke the city

i look at these frightful buildings all huddled together in what very well may have been a legitimate structural orgy and i immediately know that they are not real and i just as soon start grasping the gravity of how i really fucking DONT appear to be in kansas anymore as i begin to wish i was in those buildings instead of over here

i know they arent real and thats exactly why i want to be in them because then i would have significantly fewer responsibilities than my quite possibly utterly real miserable self does now

after some thirty odd seconds of staring at this unmoving backdrop of an impossibly overgrown urban jungle i gather my resolve and start gluing it back together with my excess adrenaline

"fuck it" i grittily swallow ten hardboiled cigarettes between the chunks of gravel im chewing as i clench my gun ever more tightly in my hands "i am either ending that turrets blasphemous mockery of a life or it is ending mine and that is fucking final"

in retrospect this attitude should have gotten me killed

instead however it granted me the rare luxury of being able to aim well as i walk in that fucking doorway and unload six rounds into the turret sitting under what i suddenly realize is ANOTHER FUCKING SET OF STAIRS

my temporary nemesis of old has already returned and it does not waste time in telling me to go fuck myself but the egg is on its face as it quickly becomes apparent that it is too late in its laughable attempts to distract me

my dedication has been momentarily honed to an atomically sharp point and i strike that fucking killdrone with implausible precision half a dozen times in a row

its like a fucking action movie as six little spent shells come poppin out of my gun one by one and dazzling bursts of blue grey sparks start flying out of the turret as i successfully hit its camera + its motor six different times in total

the thing loses all tenure with a pathetic squealing whine and as it drops itself into an abrupt stillness for a single moment there is no god

there is only a gangly ghost of a boy who fought the odds six different times in a mere moment and struck true every single fucking time

its a feat that i never ever live up to at any point following it but i am not remorseful for this

i am simply glad that i was able to experience this kind of nirvana where accurate shooting reigned supreme even when clear thinking did not

so as i stood there passively observing the wreckage of what i just aggressively destroyed

what could have easily killed me twenty separate times if i was incredibly careless and also had twenty lives somehow

i start to realize just how much im shaking and pretty much fall straight to the goddamn floor in front of this thing from the weight of that realization alone (and also because i was literally shaking that fucking much but just give me some artistic leeway here)

i dunno how long i stayed there all sweaty and gross and panting heavily like a big dog with a thick coat on a sweltering summers day but i had reached a point where i was shaking too much to even stand up so i had no choice BUT to lay the fuck still and let any biological chemicals still in me run their course

sweat is just fucking pouring off me onto the floor in sheets and i start to wonder if the real challenge is never getting a change of fucking clothing around here

its a stupid thought but it makes me laugh a little and ill tell you what it fucking kept my sanity too

which was kind of important when i finally rolled over and noticed that a motherfucking gigantic pink crystal grown from straight out of alices meth driven wonderland was sitting all pleasantly in the living room just beyond the stairs

seriously i couldnt make this shit up if i tried

maybe you would sooner accuse me of being high on some DOPE narcotics than believe this shit and that honestly wouldnt be unreasonable of you but when you see a giant pink fucking crystal growing out of the ground of an apartment and smashed through the ceiling so that it breaches the second floor

well i cant say for sure what YOU would do but given that this place was entirely unfurnished otherwise i decided to claw my way up those fucking arrogant stairs while my goddamn jello legs trailed uselessly behind me just to see if this crystal had anything at all at the top of it

maybe more broken ceilings and even a way to get on the roof of this place i thought

or maybe something that just screams "IMPORTANTLY!!!! !!" like a badly translated video game with all of its playability stemming solely from kickass graphics

i dont remember precisely what i expected to find but ill tell you what i did find

another fucking cassette tape

"your minds have been spied on" the same voice as before starts off once i jam the latest of a thrilling series of outdated informational media into my tapedeck and press play. "the rules of our world dont apply to yours, and so the threat have made a careful study of listening to your thoughts. the killdrones are the result of this research. when confronting a killdrone, be mindful of their weak points. the main systems that can be damaged are the camera, weapon, motor, and batteries. on a killdrone turret, the batteries and the motor are in the body of the weapon. the motor is directly under the turret, and the batteries behind that, near the rear of the body enclosure. targeting specific weak points will make sure every bullet counts."

in short it tells me everything i didnt already tell you because im just incredibly fucking clever and concise like that with my writing

at the time when i first listened to this tape though it was probably the most informative shit i had heard yet

some advice on how to actually stay alive by destroying the main threat to my health was a lot more appealing to me than vague messages about how i was in a fake world or that some ambiguous threat was out to kill all humans

so i listened to that fucking tape over and over

just laying on my back

staring up at the ceiling

remaining in the general presence of a fucking crystal that i could not begin to accurately name if i tried

and going through the nigh endless cycle of playing through this one tape, rewinding it, and playing it back again and again and again


	4. tape four

a lot of time passed between when i got that last tape and when i got the next one and let me tell you

it was one hell of a ride

i mean first of all i had to peel my ass (+ my back and pretty much every other body part) off the floor upstairs which wasnt even fucking carpeted it was just FLAT and thus 101% uncomfortable

and then i had to drag myself across this two story condo/apartment/bachelor pad/pink meth growing lab gone wrong in case there were any more tapes around

there werent but i did scrounge up a few bullets from the fucking upstairs bathtub so at least my ammo count went back up from its paltry 6 to an inconsequential 9

speaking of bathtubs when i first saw that thing i thought "hallelujah someplace safe where i can wash away the filth of my fucking sins" and the suggestive bullets aside i was so fucking pleased with myself for having stumbled across it

some legitimate praises started escaping my mouth like "thank fucking christ there IS a god!!! all those facebook posts praising the name of the late j c were accurate!!! fuck!!"

but come to find out this bathtub doesnt even have a fucking drain inside let alone a functional faucet to put hot or even the arguably more enjoyable cold water into it

the sink sitting next to it suffered the same horrible defects and i can only assume the toilet had no water either because despite my best efforts it proved impossible to open the fucking lid

i literally could not even take a responsible shit if i WANTED to and thats just fucked up taking away a mans ability to poop in peace and comfort

this of course is when i immediately began to revoke my earlier prayers like "you know what... nah son nvm there either isnt a god or there is but hes just fucking with me" and honestly i didnt wanna fall for the trap of endlessly praising the dude who torments me just to 'test my faith' whenever he feels like it

like listen if you wanna be a religious zealot then be my fucking guest, the same goes for atheism and anything else in the realm of believing or not believing in things

but if god feels the need to test my faith and im not even allowed to return the favor by looking for proof of his existence or asking for some help instead of just HOPING he will give it to me when i need it then that is a GRADE A abusive relationship and i refuse to participate in that shit

ill tell you what my stints with religion came and went during my brief attendance at a "private seventh-day adventist academy" that my mom enrolled me in for a year when i was twelve and besides the fact that that is four words more than should ever be necessary to describe "school" they gave me this "kid friendly" bullshit bible since i didnt have my own that made sure everything was translated even further beyond regular english to be all saccharine and cute but also "cool" and "modern" and to be perfectly blunt it tried too hard

it was like when some pathetic nerd has a crush on you but they are just the fucking WORST and so completely awkward about it and you dont reciprocate their feelings at all but you let them hurt themselves anyway because maybe theyll learn on their own or maybe youll warm up to them or whatever bullshit rationalizations you give yourself for not speaking up

but its like the more they try the more repelled you become because dude... cool your fucking jets and just REEL IT IN with that shit already

big bertha aint bitin and yet you have kept your line cast into the same spot in the same pond for two whole years do you really think "THIS is the day itll happen THIS IS THE ONE"???

im actually asking because i honestly dont know

anyway hypothetical high school love stories and tales from beyond of how (gasp) i dont believe in god aside i got a little offtrack there again

my point was that i was still covered in my own sweat and i had no means of washing it off but at least by now i had significantly less adrenaline in me or maybe i was a little more used to its presence

either way i was capable of standing again without immediately falling the fuck back down and while i was practically swimming in my own salty bodily fluids and my clothes were not helping with that matter at least i had the memory of little dory from finding nemo to tell me to just keep swimming

it helped more than you might think because finding nemo was the shit when i was younger and i am not ashamed to admit that i still watched it every now and then as a grown ass man

(thats grown ass man as in "grown-ass man," not "grown ass-man." while butts are pretty nice i guess i am a totally heterosexual male whose pointless anatomical preferences instead lean towards those round lumps with the smaller lumps on them that most women have on their chest)

so that in mind i picked myself up carefully headed down the stairs and suddenly recalled the fact that there was a kitchen down here

it was something i more or less forgot the moment i saw it because it was dark and there was again a light red translucent rock of magnificent size there to steal my attention away instead

i had no high hopes for it however and much like the upstairs bathroom none of the cupboards nor sink nor refrigerator here had any amount of give to them whatsoever besides not actually being functional at all anyway

there was a downstairs bathroom too but it was a fucking carbon copy of the one upstairs except for the startling lack of extra bullets so i came to accept the fact that maybe there was nothing else here for me in the way of literally anything useful at all whatsoever

now you may recall that i found a flashlight and i will let you know that that is not a thing that stopped being true

in fact it was how i was able to see in the bathrooms at all because there was no lighting in there, however always mentioning whether or not ive just pulled from my pocket and flicked on the ol electric torch seems a little redundant and also not that interesting so if i describe a place as being dark from now on just assume that while i keep both hands firmly latched onto my gun that my flashlight is already on and settled in nicely between my teeth unless i state otherwise ok

ok

so now that i had conquered my first real threat i felt kinda good i guess but that feeling was a little late to the party because i had just spent half an hour on the floor upstairs listening to a single cassette tape on loop

this as it turns out meant i did not feel good enough to go headin back up any other stairs in the immediate future so my only option was once again the dark room at the far end of the balcony

it turned out it only looked dark because it was this small kinda entry room that immediately went left and then forward again so it could lead to this long metal pipe that was just kind of THERE

this would not have been too bad except that it ran along the space JUST ABOVE the floor of the narrow passageway instead of maybe hanging from the ceiling or being embedded directly in the floor right and proper so i had to climb aboard this fuckin thing and just kinda scooch forward on my tummy if wanted to have any hope of traversing its mighty girth so scooch i motherfucking did

about halfway down the pipe the flashlight still being gently suckled in my maw lit up a passageway to the left and i decided the rest of the pipe really wasnt worth scooching down so i quickly jumped the fuck back off of it

this proved to be the intelligent decision because after a little snooping i found out this passageway looped back around to the other end of the pipe (behind which was like a little mini big boiler in its own alcove i guess) so take that you big blue semiphallic piece of shit i didnt have to ride you the whole way after all

thankfully this place did not ONLY loop on itself in a metaphor of self-gratification and additionally led left and then forwards again to this outside place

you know im not sure if its actually worth making relevant at this point but just so you guys maybe have a better idea of what the fuck im talking about in terms of geography im just gonna use the cardinal directions from now on alright?

so for instance when i first entered this room with the pipe i went north, then west a tiny bit and then north again so i could be greeted by the pipe that stretched from west all the way to the east wall like fifty feet away, and both at the halfway point and all the way east on this pipe the passages went north and also connected in an east-west passageway parallel to the pipe and honestly im not sure this is actually helping but it makes more sense to me if nothing else so fuck it

anyway at the far west of this final empty blue corridor it heads north again through yet another lil doorway and through it my sunglasses were greeted with the sights and smells of the outdoors and yes i realize that optical devices and odoriferous wafts dont exactly mix or make sense together but fuck you they assaulted my bitchin shades anyway

and here in the outdoors were just these fucking triangular prisms sticking out of the ground?

like for no legitimate reason they were just THERE like someone was experimenting with making a maze out of upright triangle shapes but they got bored halfway through putting it together because you could always see past a few of those prisms no matter where you were between em

absolutely disrespectful to mazebuilders the world over smh

anyway its all outdoors so i have this nice view of the totally fake not real night sky which is actually all ive got because there are some fucking legit prison walls out here preventing me from seeing those same fake buildings i was stunned by earlier

twenty feet high much like the aforementioned prisms and its not even worth seriously mentioning that i have no hope of scaling them because its immediately clear that im just not meant to

off to the east meanwhile and just in front of the prison walling over there theres a set of stairs

there are two actually in the northeast and southeast corners of this demented fucking prison yard and they both head up with two sets of stairs each like some super basic double helix shit and even better they GO somewhere

namely two places each the first being like two flights of stairs up where theres this walkway which honestly should have been further up on the description list with how large it was and how it had two pillars supporting it off the ground as it stretched all the way from north to south but w/e at least its getting its fair descriptory share now alright

this walkway DOES have rails or at least some flat waist high wallings with little lamps on them so thats classy and cool i guess

as for the other location these stairs head to its difficult for me to tell from the ground but i recognize that they both have open doorways at the top which each led fuck knows where but since its UP im more than a little interested

up means roofs means being outside and always having the option of going down even if it also means taking a little bit of a fall which honestly i will virtually always take over being in some dark dank closed spaces with fucking PIPES running through them that you gotta sidle up with your genitals and stomach if you wanna pass

so somewhat contradictionally-like i decide "ok maybe stairs are my best bet after all" because at least these motherfuckers are going as high as they fucking can as opposed to every other lone wolf single flight piece of shit i have come across before now

i have to respect stairs in architecture and structural engineering when they actually try as hard as they can and work together to stretch towards the heavens because god DAMN that is just some inspirational shit right there

im not entirely sure why i decided on climbing the stairs that were further away but i think it was because some new feeling of just getting as far away from where i had started off as possible felt inherently right within me

nothing conclusive has ever told me that this was either a good or bad idea but id say in the end the decision is a pretty neutral one when you get right down to it and youll maybe more or less see why as i unfold the story later on/straightup tell you my theories on it

anyway i climb those northeast stairs and even manage to do it without tripping or slipping down any of them and thats an accomplishment all its own but at the top

well at the top i find that the doorway up here is partially obscured by like this little concrete block and honestly im fucking thankful that it was there because first of all just inside is this slightly but not TOO wide sea foam green hallway that has what are basically carvings of shipping containers on both the left and right walls??

like there are two on the left and maybe four or five on the right and its as though this room was made by carving some fucking soapstone from the inside out instead of just putting walls and floors and ceilings together like a regular construction worker might

postmodern neofuturistic architectural shit all up in here with hella mad alien dream designs because FUCK

if anyone "gets" this shit it sure as dicks aint me

but anyway that concrete block was important because there was another turret inside and if I hadn't fucking DOVE behind that block it might have even shot me

it makes its trademark beep but as it realizes it isnt superman and therefore cannot see me through walls it chirps and goes right back to spinning in a circle like nothing ever happened

now given that i already had some experience with these things even if it was from being slightly lightheaded on the natural drugs my body was pushing through my system i felt a little confident with this motherfucker

unfortunately i let myself stumble across the entirely reasonable realization that i have no fucking idea how to aim or even properly HOLD this gun of mine and every time i try to think back to how the fuck i managed it before i just remember the satisfaction of shooting that turret six times in a row and nothing more concise than that

it was probably slightly easier in that i was brave enough aka fucking moronic enough to walk directly up to it and was therefore too close NOT to hit it at least once or twice but a few pointers from past me would have been nice even if i had to dig for them through drug addled thoughts because at least then i would have SOMETHING to work with here

anyway after a while i decided bitching to myself about myself wasnt really gonna get me anywhere so i peeked up above the block to see what kind of angles i could get on this thing

it saw me again and i instinctively pulled the trigger while pointing my gun at it but i must have forgotten to carry the fucking one in whatever instantaneous calculations i made as i shot at it because i just hit the floor beside it instead of anything that would have prevented it from shooting at me

luckily the shots it did fire only hit the concrete block as i ducked back down because i guess these robots dont have especially advanced algorithms for hitting people that are behind things (and honestly im glad for that too because if these sons of bitches could actually use math to just angle their shots and precisely bounce bullets off nearby surfaces to nail me in the head i would have been fucked an uncountable number of times over by all the little robots i came across in my travels)

so before i started wasting all my ammo on this new pos turret i started to think back to the tape that was actually still in my tapedeck

and since i had no reason not to i just rewound it and listened to it again

honestly i was inadvertently recreating a fashion statement by never taking those headphones off and always having its little cord danglin along and trailing back to the slim cassette player in my pocket but it wasnt like i gave a shit about fashion anyway since i was simply too cool for it and by the way sunglasses arent actually a fashion statement theyre just a symbol of coolness

also please try not to have an aneurysm in attempting to withhold yourself from overanalyzing that statement for legitimacy ok thanks

anyway since my main targets were the camera the motor the battery and the gun itself i started looking into what my options were as though i was some tactician who could actually change the tides of battle when it came to whether this pale fucking white sheet of a cool guy with sunglasses was going to live or die as he goes up against an automated machine gun that spews bullets like a firehose gone postal due to overt sexism in the firefighting industry

for some reason whoever made this tape never figured out that the ammo box is also an option but i guess thats because its a slightly less effective means of disabling turrets than shooting the gun?

i honestly dont know but given that it just prevents these things from reloading and that they always have a round already chambered basically they can still fire a single shot at you that will fuck up your day if you shoot the box and then think its ok to just stroll in front of them before being shot right in the nads and knowing that your enemy actually got the last laugh despite not having lungs or a mouth

also i just realized i may have been a little unclear earlier

when i said "before i started wasting all my ammo" i didnt mean "before i foolishly let myself waste my guns store of ammunition in a theoretical and alternate timeline where i do not listen to this tape again" i literally meant "the point in time in this story prior to the point in time where i waste all my fucking bullets on one stupid turret"

i will repeat for those of you who missed it that i am not a gun person and i would much rather have had a sword because if nothing else i could always go out while not only literally swinging but also while pretending that its feasible to cut a bullet in half as they instead brutally murder my ass by completely perforating it and every other part of my body

thats a pretty okay way to die in my opinion and i would have very much preferred it to being given this fucking gun

anyway despite my totally awful inaccuracy with this firearm that had you only ever seen my sweet killstreaks in halo and call of duty and alien mountain dew terrorist dorito shooter first person: the game you would be slightly surprised by, all was not lost

i did manage to solidly hit this thing once or twice in the camera using one of my last bullets and that was good enough because although it continued to spin in a circle now it had no means of targeting me

unfortunately i was now also back to square one with not having a way to defend myself

i looked around between these shipping containers but alas there were no bullets to be found in those specific locations because that would just be too fucking easy

my abilities were tested with one fucking drone and as it turned out my abilities were shit so it didnt look like the universe was gonna be giving me any freebies

in fact it looked a lot like i had another test because while there was the doorway all the way across the hall directly opposite the one i entered there was also a doorway between those two shipping container carvings on the left

(also there is a reason that most doorways keep being directly opposite one another that i can only promise you is not just me making shit up and having no idea how else to do worldbuilding but im not gonna tell you why yet because i dont know it yet in the story and i dont want you to know before me so just chalk that mystery up on the tbd board and stop frettin over it)

quaint as can be this westward doorway leads into what looked liked a totally new apartment interior with only one floor this time which was stupendous for my morale because it meant no more fucking stairs

once again i managed to hear some whirring noises before i stepped inside but this time i actually fucking paid attention and took it as a sign to put my guard up

i peeked in the doorway and besides immediately noticing that the floor was weirdly lowered by like half a foot i saw some bullets sitting on a counter,  beside which was (get ready for it) ..... another fucking cassette tape!!! (<\-- legitimate excitement maybe)

unfortunately they were being fiercely guarded by the turret i heard so when it beeped at me i had to duck back away and start frowning inconsolably to myself

"fucking cock ass bitch shit dicks" i expletived woefully as i slid sadly down the wall the doorway was a part of "what cunning bastard decided to start putting these things in positions that actually directly impedes my progress???"

i didnt know and i didnt care

there was a tape in that room and i was pretty much dutybound to go and get it

"but how???" you might wonder aloud from the peanut gallery and while you clean the spittle you just got on your screen ill tell you straight up:  i got clever

and im not talking about being a smartass so much as i mean i finally started using my goddamn noggin

i reasoned "hey these things are only ~~human~~ robots so maybe i can just get this killdrone to use up all its bullets"

it seemed like a better idea than throwing my gun at it and hoping i hit something important or waiting for its battery to run out

like i had to either hope that these things were limited in their ammunition or i had to accept defeat so hopefully it does not sound too unreasonable when i say i firmly decided to try to bait this turret into shooting at me but also missing somehow as i try to outrun some literal fucking bullets

this idea seemed valid because just through the doorway (which just to be clear was west from the hall i was in while the counter was slightly further west and moreover to the south) i could see a window at the far end of the room and also that this room was basically made in an L shape but if that L was backwards and i was looking straight up its theoretical asshole

in other words if i ran all the way towards the window the turret would see me and probably fire at me but there was absolutely no way it could still see me once i was at the window because the turret was directly in front of the counter so its viewing angle past the counters corner was complete shit

although then i began to worry about the other doorways i saw inside this place

two were off to the right on the otherwise flat and unmarred expanse of walling along the inside of this L while a third was off to the left to actually make an excuse for why this main room was in an L shape which was that there was a bathroom over there pushing things back

so anyway i had to just hope to some great cosmic deity that nothing was past any of those doorways or at the very least nothing was positioned past them in a way that would let them shoot me while i catch my breath in front of the window

and then it was just a matter of actually fucking doing it

"shit shit shit shit shit shit" i chant to myself like a goddamn magic spell as i engage in a fucking marathon sprint perpendicular to this turret

it beeps and its light visibly changes from blue to yellow to red and if youve been paying attention at all throughout any part of this story then you can probably guess what soon came flying out of its gun barrel at stupidly deadly velocities

meanwhile my short run nearly throws my ass entirely out the window as i attempt to slow down only once i am ABSOLUTELY certain that nothing has a clear shot at me which is basically not until im two feet from said window

it holds up pretty respectably to me slamming the palms of both my hands against it in a general attempt at manually braking and despite having only ran about twenty feet i already want to fucking collapse and never move again

but because the turret did not hit me im forced to acknowledge the feasible level of success that my plan might actually be attaining and thus im also pretty much obligated to run back while i still have a bulletless body to work with

"fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck" come forth the additional chants as i try to appropriately mirror my earlier success

"beep glow BLAM BLAM BLAM motherfucker" shoots the turret in incredibly rude and obnoxiously loud tones but thankfully without due precision

turret-standard bullets are getting hammered into the walls behind me as i nearly trip over the part of the floor where theres a half-foot vertical difference and it makes me stumble awkwardly but only once im back among the safety of the soapstone carvings

pretty much all throughout this series of events i felt more than ready to start vomiting but like the sweet release of death it was not yet meant to be

after about two more runs which i perform between increasingly longer periods of adrenaline-fueled rest while pumping out veritable lakes of sweat i belatedly realize that i did not hear the turret shoot at me for as long as it used to on my last run

one final agonizing dash towards the window confirms that it is no longer spitting any volume of bullets at me and finally

sweet jesus h christ FINALLY i can collapse in a puddle of my own bodily fluids again and not have to worry about being riddled with numerous tiny fragments of metal as i do so

except of course i didnt actually want to lay in a growing puddle of my own sweat two times in the same day so i just kind of padded out my run before walking over and leaning all casual like against the wall by the kitchen counter with the cassette tape

nonchalantly glancing at it from a short distance away but only occasionally so that it knows im interested without developing the mistaken impression that im desperate

then just to drive home the fact that im an independent white man who dont need no pseudo spiritual guidance i decide to scoop up the bullets first and start counting them one by one

there werent enough to fill up even a quarter of my guns magazine but i start meticulously loading them in anyway across an achingly slow number of seconds

and then i get the brilliant idea to search the rest of the apartment for more bullets, and while this proved to be an intelligent move that landed me with twenty bullets in total i ended up leaving the tape a little neglected and admittedly this was totally uncool of me

i will not blame any reader who begins to hold the belief that i am anything less than 100% chivalrous but for the sake of speeding past my lengthy consolation talks with the tape im just gonna write down what it said now

"your crude world is not the true reality; your physical body here is the shadow cast by your transcendent mind. we call this higher plane "reality a," and your world of shadows "reality b." if you are receiving this message in a fictional context, you are at an even deeper level -- one that we cannot reach. because your body is a shadow of your mind, when your mind dies your body will vanish. in the normal order of your world death is merely a transition in which your mind is set free. but for victims of the coming mindkill, there is only oblivion."

in short it is very bluntly revealed that im literally in the shadow realm but for some reason not being in the definitively real world hasnt stopped sweat from pouring off my body in tsunami waves

of course i am actually employing very slight exaggeration when it comes to the exact volumes of just how much sweat was being produced by my body but thats my artistic right as a storyteller and i refuse to give it up

anyway after listening to this tape i once again sat my ass down for a good solid half hour or so of rest and because thats boring and tedious as hell of a thing to do or describe im just gonna emphatically end the chapter here


	5. tape five + tape six

so while reading over everything ive already posted as i thought about how to generally conclude the remainder of this story i realized i made some major mistakes

the first was that the title of this thing sucked ass so if youre a new reader you can thank me for the implicitly better title pretty much whenever because the old title is gone forever now

another thing was that admittedly i keep talking way too much about sweat and adrenaline and i understand that it might be a little weird to some people if i spend most of my time just talking about bodily fluids but on the other hand i gotta let you know that i had some character development doing this shit

in other words eventually i stop shaking and shivering every time i hear a beep or see a blue/yellow/red light and also i stop talking about how ive basically got a drug addiction to my own endorphins but that can only noticeably stop happening if it had originally been a thing in the first place so i hope you will bear with me here as i make that no longer a thing but only gradually

finally i noticed i missed some prime opportunities to start rapping and i hafta say that one hit me the hardest

like i know you know i might be slowly dying here but its really been starting to weigh down on me even more than any feasible injuries (which i very well might be saying despite being perfectly healthy but lets not get into those mental gymnastics right now)

the point is i have to frequently release my creative flow much like the average human being has to empty their bladder only what comes out of my metaphorical rapping bladder is not urine but instead the fuel and also ignition for white hot burning fires that not even the strongest or most able bodied firefighter can extinguish

i actually started mumbling a few verses of some unfinished raps to myself while reading the stuff i had written so i hope you understand the seriousness of the situation when i say that i have a more or less medically legitimate need to rap

however to make sure this doesnt become some masturbatory ego stroking collection of letters and words ive embarrassingly typed up for all to see i have decided that i will only rap when something dangerous or life threatening starts to happen in the story which hopefully will heighten tension appropriately

personally i think itll be pretty cool to be reading a passage like

"so there i was walking around and looking for more bullets and tapes as had become my general prerogative and all the while my clothes were still stuck to me in a half dry half moist mix of the same grody sweat that was REALLY starting to chafe in some places but it hadnt yet gotten to the point where i would feel more comfortable strolling around nude so i kept them on

when suddenly there came a beep that sounded quite aggressive

i turned and saw a killdrone lookin yellow and oppressive

but i aint talkin politics cause this shit it wasnt civil

motherfucker had a gun he didnt care about my drivel

bang bang bang and blap blap blap this machine began to shoot

when all i had been doing was just looking for sweet loot

i ran and slid and did a roll all to just evade them

but those bullets were too wicked fast and tore right through my shirts hem"

like ok that definitely is not my best work when it comes to solidly keeping the tempo and producing rhymes that are legitimately worthy of phat beats but that was pretty much just a test run so dont worry theres plenty more where that came from and itll be way higher quality

(and it was still cool anyway so dont bother trying to dispute that either because trust me i have had years of practice doing cool things and writing sick raps, like you could easily catch some nasty influenza if i posted some of my prewritten raps on here so to spare you the runny nose and puffy eyes ill just keep those gnarly flames offa this original content im hashing out)

anyway this was just a foreword so you would all be aware that i am aware of my own flaws and that i am now doing my best to correct them so um youre fucking welcome

now lets get back to the action

* * *

when we last left off our hero (haha as if) of the story was just dicking around in an apartment with a live killdrone that could do absolutely nothing but beep and angrily stare at him unless he walked away at which point it would chirp and just spin its head in a circle but we arent here to feel bad about the poor little robot that couldnt we are here to feel bad about the guy for whom shit was actually starting to look noticeably dope

like he had already successfully dealt with three separate deadly deadly robots and although the odds were against him in that he would need to triumph over these suckers time and time again while only one of them needed to land exactly one good shot on him to permanently end his life he was feeling pretty confident

(i know because at one point i was him)

so given that this cool dude rocking a fully loaded gun was rearing to go it should be pretty understandable at this point in the story that go is exactly what i fucking did

i strolled right on out of that apartments doorway and continued on through that other doorway to the north and ill be honest i wound up a little disappointed when i came upon this pitch black enclosed roof that basically just taunted me with how dark it was and how high the walls were around it even though that is not at all a reasonable fucking way to construct a roof of any kind

roofs are for being the topmost part of a building not for being like twenty or thirty feet shorter than all the fucking walls surrounding it

gotta say that really put a hamper on my mood but i refused to let it drag me too far down so i marched right through that dark semienclosed space and although i had to walk a really stupid path around some big metal structures that were maybe oil tanks for some reason ultimately they didnt stop me and no beeps or whirs came at my ear drums so i was still in the clear

next roof was a lot more respectable because immediately to my left were two air ducts side by side that lifted slightly off of the roof they were poppin out of to just let me KNOW i was on a roof and nowhere else

although this roof in particular was actually pretty stupidly designed too because it was like two separate parts at the top with a little gap between em that i would have to jump if i wanted to continue and just below this topmost top part was a lower top part and i mean thats bullshit because roofs are not supposed to suddenly drop down a story and then continue being a roof its supposed to drop all the way to the fucking ground in a more or less entirely vertical manner

anyway once i stopped not crying over that specific batch of spilled milk i realized for the first time that the three killdrone turrets i had fought so far were not actually the only types of killdrones i would have to deal with

i realized this because i saw a blue light hitting the wall way in front of me where the new north doorway was and immediately afterward saw this little rubber twinkie wearing a protective floatie around its propellers shining its camera down at said wall but slowly spinning to face me

its fucking bullshit but i guess whoever made these things decided to split their forces into both land AND air variants which as you might have guessed means its rapping time already so lets fucking do this shit

crunchy gravel underfoot and a vast night sky around us

this little flying robot thought hed up and make a sound thus

a beep escaped it high in pitch and piercing through the air

as it decided "its high time i divebombed over there"

it spun and flew and gave me precious little time to waste

so i quickly ducked off to the side to avoid getting erased

and as i rolled under that duct which spared me from this fate

i felt my foot clack up against yet another cassette tape

(seriously i could not fucking believe that shit when it happened, like besides the fact that this drone nearly delivered a fatal headbutt to me i had also just performed a successful action roll under some air ducts AND had it immediately rewarded with the main thing i was looking for in this place so go me but anyway back to the rap)

although i hid in safety from a crackling death stun

i felt heavily tormented by this killdrones taser gun

(btw the flying drones have tasers which is kinda good because it means they cant just fly at me while spitting out a barrage of bullets but it also means instant electrocution if they so much as touch me so thats pretty bad too but anyway this is the last interruption i swear, im just as bummed if not more bummed than you about breaking the flow but its my storytelling duty to make sure youre informed)

under one duct under two my rolls could not be stopped

i nearly fell off of the roof while the killdrone pop pop popped

thankfully i have a grip which strengthens under pressure

it prevented me from falling down by a "handy" measure

and as i hung so carefully from this roof above itself

i heard the flying killdrone chirp, twas a swell boon for my health

struggling so gallantly i pulled myself back up

and managed to do it quietly without even a "hup"

my gun suffered a brutal dragging but now it got to shine

i cocked it locked it pulled the trigger and shot that drones lifeline

by which of course i mean i just kind of shot the middle of its disturbingly phallic oblong body which if it had been made in any way that made sense whatsoever was where the motor was and since it actually was there the whole thing fell to the ground much like a shitty rc drone that just runs out of batteries three minutes into its maiden flight

also sorry for abruptly stopping my rap there i guess but not really

its just that when the drone is dead the danger has passed and thus i am contractually obligated by my own words to spare you from any more unvaccinated incendiaries so if you have a problem with that take it up with past me

oh wait you cant because hes no longer around oh well so much for that the complaints department is now closed tough luck suckers

anyway i would consider that a successful action rap if one that was a little basic and maybe even slightly underfed but honestly its hard to pack in ALL the details of a given situation when your main goal is to be smokey the bears musically talented mortal enemy

like it might not have been clear exactly what angle i had on this drone when i pulled myself back up or that when i was hanging off the ledge i was basically using my left hand and the palm of my right hand to hold on while the slender fuckin digits of righty were making sure my gun didnt fall off but in the process knuckled it through the gravel a little but sometimes you just gotta be selective like that i guess

also speaking of which i kinda want to retroactively name this gun of mine because i never did when i was actually using it and i feel a little bad about having kept it with me all this time and giving it a few minor battle scars but never affectionately naming it anything

it should be something wildly inappropriate to name a gun though like doris or jim

maybe trevor

just dave strider and trevor and dont forget michael the flashlight guest starring frank the tapedeck

actually frank is a little too formal lets call him franklin instead

just hand out names to all my worldly possessions like cheap cigars because honestly why not

and now that that bullshit is out of the way we can move on by which i mean i can tell you what that stupidly lucky find of an additional cassette tape had to say

"if you recently started receiving you may wonder why the training tapes are so important. over the last several decades your media has been slowly corrupted to be used against you. by feeding your mind a constant stream of damaging ideas, your view of reality has been warped to fit into a sinister agenda. how can one tape, listened to once, possibly have an impact on the face of a lifetime of accumulated deception? it can only have the smallest effect -- but even that small effect can be built on. if you listen to that tape one hundred times, you may notice a difference in how you feel. if you listen to the tape a thousand times, you will be transformed. and if you listen to the tape a million times, you will become more than human: an awake receiver. listen to as many tapes as you can, listen to them as often as you can."

to be honest i didnt feel like this tape in particular actually told me all that much when i first heard it because the only new idea it had to bring to the table was that instead of just listening to these tapes i should also listen to them often

like wow seriously??? i thought i was supposed to be shoving these things up my gaping anus while staring intently at my decidedly lascivious feet and suddenly youre telling that i should be listening to these goddamn things instead????

shit mister i didnt even get to hear THIS message until its medium had taken a nice vacation in my colon on twelve separate occasions at which point i decided i had too many tapes filling my jean pockets/butthole and decided to store one in my tapedeck before accidentally pressing play while i tried to see what the big deal is about autoerotic asphyxiation

and with that in mind i just kind of stood up and kept on walking but so long as this one was still in my tapedeck i just kind of moodily said "fine" and rewound it so i could listen to it however many times was needed to ensure that i wake the fuck up apparently

you might have missed it given all the things this guy has said and how vague they all are but it turns out this tape among others actually secretly said some important shit and if not for the fact that it encouraged me to listen to some of these tapes more than once i might not have picked up on it myself

but like a few tapes ago he said that i was basically a so called "receiver" and so was the dude behind these audio tapes (aka him himself) only he had a strong enough mental signal to pick up and carry on the message in a self referential loop of informational fellatio and thus this message was not actually coming from him per se but instead from whatever cosmic good guys there are helpin us human dipshits out by using at least one as a fucking recording booth

that turns out to be a pretty relevant and important thing and so is what he said about being awake because basically thats my end goal: just waking the fuck up

of course that sounds stupid as hell like some crackpot conspiracy theorists corkboard wall thats just plastered in postit notes and various hues of twine stretching from thumbtack to thumbtack because OH SHIT the world was DEFINITELY under attack by some aliens or whatever which have been lovingly named "the threat"!!! which is the most generic fucking name possible for them but also one that should strike fear into your various human organs!!!! theyve been polluting our media with their damaging ideas and weakening our stupid asses which honestly isnt even that hard to believe but its TOTALLY FOR REAL THIS TIME and ACTUALLY HAPPENING ALSO!!!!!

only what was the biggest jar of piss about this shit was that that was pretty much actually seriously true

i mean i already had the tapes telling me im in some "world of shadows" and i could see the fake as shit buildings around me so i didnt have much to question there but at the same time i just kind of left it on the mental back burners for processing

like "yeah sure okay im in a false world full of specially designed robots trying to kill me because im that goddamn important and i gotta wake myself the fuck up by dropping all these truth bombs on myself from these sicknasty informational cassette tapes"

"whens lunch im starting to get the munchies"

actually i distinctly recall trying to make myself hungry just so i would know it was still possible but that failed so i guess whatever part of me that let me still produce sweat and adrenaline didnt take the other bodily processes along for the ride

so then i went through a period of time where i questioned whether this shit was like inception because it was an idea to latch onto and MAYBE I AM DREAMING WHO KNOWS???

at this moment in time i very much doubt this but thats because i know more now than i did when i actually thought these things but i cant very well tell you EVERYTHING i know right here and now because then this isnt a story its at best a shitty recap

so fuck that its back to being coy and cheeky with all these slights and withholdings of information

anyway i jumped the entirely negligible gap between the top two parts of this roof i mentioned earlier but i got confused once i was on the other side because i saw a suspiciously familiar looking balcony through the doorway

only the irony was that although i had inadvertently begun to stumble upon a new factoid about how fake the world i was in actually WAS this was a totally different balcony and i was just kind of a fucking moron looking for connections where for the most part there actually were none

guess thats what happens when you have nothing to listen to but cassette tapes full of bullshittingly true conspiracies that arent even THEORIES theyre just facts

anyway it was especially confusing because the doorway on the wall opposite the balcony led to an apartment that looked literally exactly like the one with the crystal except in that it was furnished and did not have the crystal

like that sounds absolutely stupid when the thing i use to convey it is missing but i mean the same fucking stairs were and there the kitchen was off to the left and arranged the exact same way while the bathrooms were stacked on top of each other so that there was one on each floor and there was even the same window taking up pretty much the whole wall in the living room, only this one wasnt obscured by a huge pink crystal

it was fucking surreal but at the same time the kind of thing that makes a guy placidly go "oh. huh. i guess this world IS fake as shit if parts of it are just being blatantly copied and pasted like this."

oh yeah also on the table that was directly in front of the doorway there was another killdrone turret so while i took in these revelations i had to do so in about two thirds of a second as this thing turned and saw me almost immediately

thankfully it was the easiest one to shoot yet because of how close i could get just by leaning past the doorway so once it chirped and resumed its spinning i just ducked out shot it in the battery and watched it power the fuck down

this as you may have guessed meant that it was never actually especially dangerous and therefore isnt worth my rapping power

two more turrets were inside with one being in the kitchen and another being in the living room but honestly nothing especially exciting happened with them either as i ducked out and shot them both as soon as was feasible

they both took a few shots because my aim was shit but at least i had an idea of what to hit on them so it was really just a waiting game

after dealing with those unpleasant mechanical fellers i scooped up the bullets in the kitchen and on the coffee table because hey as long as its there ive got no qualms with taking it

upstairs though my buttocks fucking quivered as i entered what i realized was a bedroom with an actual fucking bed

"could it be???" i drooled while simultaneously ejaculating thirteen separate times before i could even whip the ol vienna sausage out for a good polishing "the promised land where i can sleep while waiting on that literal 'stay woke' goal to come true???"

it wasnt because a quick prodding confirmed that the bed was hard and chunky and totally uncomfortable as fuck which made me realize i had not sat down on anything pleasant for a LONG time now

if waking up was not a good enough goal then escaping this world where ass comfort was null and void definitely held some solid intrinsic value

all was not lost however because while the excessive firmness to this bed was a major bonerkill there was a bookcase in here which was totally empty save for a single cassette tape

at this point im already rolling in cassette tapes like i dont know how many of these fucking things im supposed to be finding in total but this one makes six and i start worrying about whether im gonna have to maybe squirrel this shit away someplace where i can safely return to stockpile them for the winter because my pockets are not that big and i had only gotten this far because my back pockets had stepped in with their extra albeit ultimately insufficient internal volume

it seems like a preferable alternative to swallowing them all now and trying to cart them around in my stomach so that when its time to hibernate ill be ready except wait shit im already asleep or something and hibernation is basically also sleep so fuck i guess i really AM conditioned to think bad thoughts

anyway new tape goes like this:

"you are listening to the first tape of the "perpetual" set. this set of tapes represents the most critical receivings, so that future humans will have the information they will need after the mindkill. this set, when listened to sufficiently and in its entirety, has been speculated to be the minimum teachings needed to achieve an awake state. besides this tape the tapes included in this set are: "firearm operation," "initiation tape a," "mindtech," "reality b," "mindtech: cleartape," "mindkill contingency," "killdrones," "repeated listenings," "the cleartape," "awake.""

so like its pretty fucking convenient that as soon as i start wondering how many tapes i gotta hunt down i find one that tells me how many OTHER tapes there are so again i cant exactly blame you if you look at this shit and decide maybe not to really believe that it happened after all but honestly theres always going to be disbelief when youre dealing with conspiracy shit so i guess its nothing to fault you doubting dorothies for

moreover though i suddenly realized that i have not at all been finding or listening to these tapes in order if this is the first one which means that if i dont understand what one of these tapes is alluding to ill just have to fucking suck it up until i find the tape that sheds light on its relevance

and then i started to try to figure out which of these tapes is which because none of them are actually physically labelled but i quickly realized as i repeatedly rewound this one tape to hear all the names that im really not gonna figure out which tapes are which without wasting a minimum of one sordid half hour on listening to and rewinding every single tape i already have and then trying to figure out which vague name goes to which vague tape of the bunch which would ultimately be pointless anyway because all the tapes still look the fucking same and i dont really have a marker around to make sure i dont mix them the fuck up

so basically i just settle for knowing that there are a total of eleven tapes if i include this one that just tells me there are ten other tapes to listen to out there

only five more to go if i ever want to see my friends and family again assuming they arent all dead from this mindkill bullshit which admittedly they probably are because im probably destined to join them


	6. tape seven

so armed with the knowledge that i was pretty much half done with my quest i felt another new surge of confidence kind of

especially since i had just found two in a row like hell yes this shit is easy ill finish this shit up and be home in time for dinner and maybe even a good j o session

but of course the moment you start to think something is simple it becomes ridiculously complex

it might have seemed like pretty much just a cake walk up until now and thats because it was but for the sake of not leaving you all hanging as you wonder what the fuck im rambling on about ill just give you my two cents on the matter based on all the personal experience ive accumulated up to the end of this story

this fake world im in was pretty much made really shittily (which is why a lot of things are blocklike although i havent really been describing that too well but fuck it its the truth anyway) and also with a bunch of segmented pieces that are just strung together in a really fucking long conga line that tbh might even go on forever

you may have noticed that for most of my travels so far ive only been heading north through most of these doorways and thats because whatever evil fucks decided that they were capable of constructing their own world either got lazy or forgot to stop thinking one dimensionally once they had made a single 3d "cell"

i call it a cell because the guy from the tapes said i was in a cell in the first tape i listened to so i mean i might as well call them that because it sounds slightly less godawful than "segment"

but anyway this is pretty much why the doorways i find are almost always directly opposite one another because otherwise they wouldnt be able to fucking connect between cells

these cells also each have three different levels to them and each level has its own place to put these doorways but this was not immediately obvious to me because the only place i could have figured this out in thus far was the prison yard and i pretty much left that area as soon as i reached it so the concept was lost on me until i looked into these things further later on

that later on started to be right about now in the story though because while i was holding a few tapes in my hand to idly wonder about how i was gonna carry all of them around with me since my pockets were getting a little full i left the apartment and started going north until i found myself in front of the doorway to the soapstone shipping container room again

only it wasnt actually "again" because as i said the motherfuckers who created this place were not too bright or especially invested in making a DECENT shadow world so this was technically a different cell all its own but one that looked more or less exactly like the one i had been in before

as far as i have come to find them pretty much every cell has its own structural layout that will include a static arrangement of a bottom middle and top room but the placement of bullets tapes and killdrones within these collections of rooms is always going to be different, however all of these things seem to become more and more radically numerous the further you travel from the cell you started in so if youre willing to face more killdrones youre generally gonna be rewarded with more bullets and maybe a tape here or there if youre lucky (and so far i pretty much only got as many tapes as i did solely by being stupidly fucking lucky so be prepared for that to suddenly turn around soon)

i realize i said "you" a lot instead of anything that only refers to myself which is ironically enough from personal bias

the way the guy on the tapes speaks makes it sound like im probably not the only person going through this but i suppose i dont know that for sure and i definitely dont know how similar my experiences will be to anyone else

although given that for all i know the only peeps who will be able to read this are other people who have gone through roughly the same shit as i have maybe i shouldnt have so scornfully told you i probably wouldnt read your comments earlier

at this time i would like to sincerely apologize for that i was feeling a little jaded at the time and arguably i still am but if you want to maybe pretend to have coffee later in the comments then i guess ill be down for that if i havent died before then from any number of possible life threatening maladies that may or may not be plaguing my worthless dream body right now

but anyway to get back on track that thing i talked about with the increasing diversity of convenient pickups and deadly killdrones is why there were two turrets nestled in snugly between the carvings on the right wall in the room in front of me rather than being only one out in the open near the left wall like the last soapstone place had

this wasnt really especially dangerous either though and i HAVE just realized that i inadvertently wrote myself into a corner with that whole "only rap during danger" thing i said because i mean turrets pretty much werent shit anymore at this point in the story

like dont get me wrong they were still capable of killing me but now i could very easily take them down by hiding behind a wall and taking amateurishly aimed potshots at them until i heard their motors whine as a bullet stopped their movements entirely or i saw some sparks fly as their battery meets a bullet from the wrong side of town

pretty much the only serious danger left in them was if one of them took me by surprise so i guess if you want more raps outta me its either wait for a moment like that or wait for more aerial killdrones to enter the picture since thats all that has any potential merit for ending my life anymore

im just as sad about it as you are and probably even sadder but i am a strider of my word and i cant just go back and change what i wrote earlier so i can rap more. that would be fucking cheating so fuck that ill just suck it up and if necessary quietly rap to myself instead of writing it down

anyway i used maybe five bullets on these chumps and then another two or three on the turret sitting near the window in the apartment that beeped at me when i looked for bullets between the shipping container carvings

maybe a few bullets flew at me from said third turret but if so none of them hit because i was just too fast like that

honestly it gets a little hazy with the numbers of bullets that were or were not around me at this point in the story because i was actually starting to come at this shit pretty calmlike and without so much adrenaline pouring through me or sweat pouring out of me so the details didnt really stick in my mind as much i guess

i might not even be totally accurate on the positions of these turrets but honestly i dont care about that its my own goddamn story so the only one around here to tell me im being inaccurate on that front is myself

anyhow i cautiously edged my way into the apartment to look for more killdrones + bullets and tapes but the kitchen was clear of all of these things so that definitely confirmed for me the fact that these cells have different surprises inside each and every time

however directly to the north inside the apartment where there was a doorway leading to an otherwise empty room a turret was whirring and spinning and nearly caught sight of me but as i got ballsy and decided to try shooting it before it turned to face me i got lucky or maybe even leveled up my fucking accuracy with trevor and successfully hit its motor on the first try

it was still a little feisty because even the turrets that cant move are still capable of firing their gun its just that they can no longer aim it at you, although sometimes they might not need to because if you walk in their line of sight the wild recoil they get from trying to shoot you could easily be enough to knock their aim towards you if youre too close + stupid aka boldly suicidal

its pretty inspiring for cripples i guess especially if any of you out there maybe have prosthetics so that you can relate to this malfunctioning droid but if anyone is reading this and has a prosthetic id be more interested in whether they went to this purgatorial death dream too and if so whether the prosthetic came with them on their dream self

i mean i got to keep the clothes i was wearing + my sunglasses so i would assume this is the case but alternatively maybe you just actually have all your limbs in this dream world instead?

all of this hypothetical speculation makes for wildly great conversational material so you know what i wholeheartedly encourage you to share your story in the comments below so we can talk about how much our mutual fates suck total ass

but anyway enough about potential romantic relationships forming in the comments section i need to continue on with this story of mine

this turret was crippled and i taunted death itself by walking into its field of view without stepping in front of the gun but to my surprise although its cameras light turned red it didnt fire

like i hadnt shot the gun so why wasnt it firing?? doesnt the red light mean its going to try firing if it has bullets???

i briefly played with the idea of someone having been through here before me but it was just a poor attempt at trying to feel less alone because the total lack of bullet holes in the turrets gun parts or the walls around it thoroughly denied this possibility

also when i got a little closer it DID start firing and again the recoil made it spew bullets in a small conelike area but my reflexes were good enough to not stand within range of that cone for any lethal amounts of time

just to make sure i could not in any way be fucked over by this thing i put trevor up to its camera from a safe angle and pulled the trigger so that it would be paralyzed AND blind forever now

it was like putting down a vicious dog you loved once but that had developed rabies and you werent even putting it down so much as putting it in an eternal state of never being able to see or move again and thats when i began to wonder if robots dream because space odyssey 2001 had a robot ask this exact question before it "died" and that robot asked it of a character named dave no less

except that as a reality check i never loved this fucking thing especially not in the manner in which one might enjoy the company of a faithful canine companion, i just wanted it dead

so actually it was nothing like that

i did question whether it would dream though and decided to waste a third bullet on it just so the battery would be gone too

felt a little morbid just torturing this robot like that but i mean these things are an enemy designed with the express purpose of ending my shitty life so i have nothing to legitimately feel bad about

i checked out both the bathrooms in this apartment while noting that every apartment i had come across so far had had two bathrooms while only one had a proper bedroom and that made me wonder what the fuck kind of interior design the big bad "threat" behind this places construction studied before making all this

when youre just inherently evil though i guess you dont have time to do things like understand how often a humans gonna need to piss or poop compared to eating or sleeping especially when none of those things are relevant anyway

if im dreaming then im not real and neither is my insatiable thirst or hunger and further that means i can probably remove the sweat from my clothes just by thinking it

that has yet to work though so idk what rules do apply and what dont here but theyre definitely arbitrary and this might be because this place wasnt created to pander to my very human needs so much as it was created to fucking kill me

anyway i found a few bullets lying around but none in a memorable amount so lets just kind of leave the bullet count vague for now and say i had "enough"

i exited the apartment and went north to find myself on a walkway i had never seen before that was mostly plain but more importantly it was outside

unexpectedly there was a beep that sounded very ominous

i flinched and put trevor up to construe an air of competence

another flying drone was making its presence known

but it didnt know the king of rap; tis i upon the throne

a little flying dildo aint too much to be afraid of

so i took a couple shots at this thing, a shade of

motherfucking BEIGE like a stale and crunchy 'mallow

but this shit its got no cream only a hankering for my ammo

unfortunate-ly, this aerial motherfucker

deflected all of my shots making me look like a sucker

forced to dodge its headlong charge i dove down to the ground

and in a moment of inspiration i turned myself around

pulled the trigger once, then twice, then THRICE

bullets pelting this killdrone till its blind as some MICE

robot got ICED real NICE after i rolled the DICE

ok enough abusing that sick rhyme its pretty unfair to take advantage of a syllable thats under the weather anyway

basically i shot the flying killdrones camera as it flew over me and thus it could no longer target or assault me so once again the danger has passed

i felt the rapping spirit within me come back a lil stronger this time than before but if ill be perfectly honest im just not feeling it like i thought i would

it might not really show all that well but a lot of this shits hit me pretty hard and any feasible grievous wounds i might be suffering from aside i think the only reason i started trying to convey this story was a general sense of loneliness assaulting me that i figured might sting a little less if i wrote all this out so that if anyone else IS out there at least theyll know i was out here too

i know i know its sad and pathetic and i should really grow the fuck up because life just sucks like that but SHIT at least let me give myself a softer landing as the reality of how desolate my life is right now comes crashing down around me

and actually you know what ive left it pretty unclear for a while now so ill just make this slightly less unclear but also maybe slightly more so i hope youre ready for this shit

first off im not slowly bleeding to death as i type this

like i mean wow what a shocker my hands werent getting all shakey and making stupid typos all over the place and i wasnt babbling so much as i was occasionally rambling but theres some factual clarity for you that i am not actively staring death in the fucking face right now and i can now stop being all coy with "maybe im slowly dying here who knows!!!"

HOWEVER!

im not out of the woods yet or in simpler terms i have not yet awoken or transcended this mortal realm of shadows otherwise known as "reality b"

but thats all im gonna tell you right now so that there remains at least a shred of intrigue as to why the fuck i would decide to write all this up if things are not wholly hunky dory but also arent totally full of suck

like i said it was because of loneliness but where did this loneliness come from?? what was the exact precursor to it??? and i mean any other questions that maybe people might be wondering the answers to if theyre still reading this shit

well youll find out in due time because we are nearing the end of this personal fiasco but i gotta close the story book good and proper alright? i hope you understand

anyway as i stood up on the walkway i nearly died on i realized it went west in the middle

that kind of detail escaped me as a flying rubber penis-metaphor came at me with a taser because honestly its really difficult not to be distracted by that kind of a thing whenever it appears

even now i was somewhat warily observing this thing as it bobbed all wobbly around the spot where i shot it at because now that it was blind it didnt really have any sense of where to go or what to do

it made me laugh a little because it repeatedly bumped into the railing over and over again like it just kept HAPPENING

but as i was saying

the walkway went west in the middle and as fate would have it there were some more motherfucking stairs over there too but these sonsuvbitches only went down

also there was a turret guarding them but it never had a chance of seeing me before i saw it due to the wall-like waisthigh railings all around this walkway so i was able to shoot it in the battery without too much fuss or beeping

nonetheless despite the fact that my only means of safely heading down here was a set of three flights of stairs i decided maybe being generally UP and outside was not all its cracked up to be

i mean for one outside was where every single flying drone had been so far so it was really losing its initial appeal of being full of options and maybe even more conducive to safety or what have you

so after i took a quick gander over the side of the top of these stairs to see if there were any enemies below i found none and continued on

ok actually i found a turret lower down on the landing under one of the sets of stairs but ill be honest it might as well have not even been there. these things are shit at looking up and i just executed it real coldlike so it just never even had a chance

i found some bullets at the bottom of these stairs and thats really all there was of consequence here

a pipe ran from north to south off against the west wall with some more of my old friend drastically insufficient christmas lights but no bullets were over there

they were only under the stairs by the turret thats barely worth mentioning and also near one of the pillars down here that were holding up the walkway

once i scooped all those up i went for the north doorway again so i could enter what looked like a mostly empty room with some pillars inside and nothing that would really prevent me from getting to the next doorway or its cell

but as it just so happens this was not at all the case

and blue light after blue light began to glow before my face

despite being under a roof these flying drones existed

hindering my progress was the boon these dickheads gifted

and as i stared them up and down these fucks began to drop

each one flashing yellow with red intent to make me stop

but feeling so attached to my chances at survival

i ran backwards from the doorway to slow down their arrival

it was no easy feat, but i lost one two or three

the fourth however cleared the door so it could try zapping me

i dashed around the stairs and left it lost between the slats

unable to retaliate when i shot down its ass

and at that point i realized there was pretty much no way for me to go north from down here because apparently these flying drones were now gonna try tormenting me from indoors too

it sucked but i didnt want to try running past them all with a vague hope that none of them would taser me and i especially didnt want to go through the hassle of trying to lure them out one at a time while hoping they didnt accomplish a legitimate swarm

like its generally easy to kill a single bee thats flying around you but when that motherfucker calls on his friends from the hive you better get your ass the FUCK out of dodge if you dont plan on dying

and while there were only three or so drones behind that doorway these drones were also much larger than most bees

like each one was the size of maybe 50 or 100 bees packed together, possibly even more

im not really an expert at calculating the number of bees that would fit into the volume of a given object but even if we assumed each of these things was only 50 bees that was still a minimum of 150 bees to deal with

50 bees alone is enough to make most men question whether a given risk is worth it and given that i had already faced that risk three times in the past hour i felt confident in saying that i did not want to continue doing so at this moment in time especially not with a concentrated dose

that said because i had JUST finished climbing down those stairs i didnt really wanna head back up em so my only remaining option was south

to the south was a dark hallway which immediately went east so i quickly cooked up some personal distaste for it because it was indoors and had a relatively low ceiling and was also going to require the use of michael again

i guess that was one benefit i hadnt immediately noticed but being outside meant less use of my flashlight

"oh well" i slurped dejectedly and yet also enthusiastically while fishing for michael out of my pocket "guess its time to ram this metallic bad boy back into position!!"

i did so and walked south and then east and was greeted with the stressful blessing of choice as the wall running from east to west before me opened up in two separate doorways, one heading straight south all the way off to the east while the one closer to the middle went south and then directly west

the east doorway proved to be a poor option because my exploration of it immediately yielded a killdrone turret so i backed right the fuck up from that shit

going down the other passage however yielded TWO turrets at its end where it went south and also had a long and oddly convenient window for seeing whether the mini apartment i had just noped out of had anything inside

so after i meticulously took down these two drones i looked through this window and faintly saw that there were some bullets inside + another turret but no tapes

i felt more or less confident enough with my current stock not to bother but immediately afterward realized that was an impossibly stupid mindset

"im fine on ammo right now so i better just leave these here turrets alive so that if i ever need ammo i have zero fucking chance of getting to it"

it was laborious and boring but i took care of the first turret i had seen and then its friend further inside + the motherfucker who nearly got a good shot on me from the open bathroom

i cant remember how much of a haul i got but im pretty sure i came out of the situation with a net gain on bullets so hooray for general memories of good things that happened

back down the hallway where i killed the two drones it went east again at its far end but thankfully that was where this cell ended as it instead spilled south out onto a pleasant if somewhat conservative closed patio

at least thats how i would describe it because it was just two separate housing dealios that were stacked on top of one another via some inconveniently useful stairs up out front and was completely surrounded by more waisthigh walls because i guess whoever designed this place heard the term "insurmountable waisthigh fence" and thought it was literal and not just a description of jankass bullshit invisible walls in video games

now i could describe at length how i found two turrets downstairs and three turrets upstairs in this condo but im not gonna because none of them were especially compromising or interesting in their position

also i found a cassette tape in the upstairs fireplace which seems a helluva lot more relevant here so ill just go ahead and give you the scoop on that instead

"some receivers believe the message, but are unable to hear the source themselves. we have developed a mindtech called "cleartape" to aid in your receiving. your subconscious mind has been eroded by dangerous addictive media; to wean you from this addiction, we will trick your mind using its conditioned response to your advantage. by providing the correct external cues, cleartape provides a way to reduce the symptoms of media damage. you will have been issued a cleartape. put the tape into your tape deck and press play. at first it is normal to only hear background static; after several sessions, you may hear a voice."

now this was where i got fucking INTERESTED and INVESTED in this shit because this was an objective i could get behind

obviously my general end goal here was still to just wake up and i already had the general objective of accomplishing this by finding more tapes but that was one i had more or less given to myself

this on the other hand gave me the very specific purpose of finding exactly one tape and just listening to it over and over

i had already been listening to some of my tapes on repeat ever since that other tape told me to but this one definitely sounded the most important of them all

i now had an idea of what the means to my end seriously were which meant i could pursue them with a legitimate passion

watch the fuck out reality b i have another confidence boost to push me the fuck forward and i intend to use the shit out of it


	7. tape eight + tape nine + tape ten

ok so im gonna mix things up a little here because while this undoubtedly started out as the coolest fucking story youve ever goddamn read i am admittedly starting to question whether that initial level of coolness has lasted up to this point and honestly i dont wanna take any chances

what this means for you is im gonna speed through a few events and more or less just tell you the good parts and maybe even generalize a lot of shit because as i go searching for that ultimatum of cassette tapes to pop into franklin it gets pretty fuckin tedious

i mean arguably it has already BEEN tedious but i was just lying to myself every time i shook my head and was like "nah, no way man youve still got it theres no way you can fuck up your own story bro its too good"

either way i feel the need to expedite matters BUT as a precursor to closing up this fantastical little story book with all that good shit, i feel the need to give all yall the lowdown on every cell i have come across in my travels just so there can be some kind of descriptive closure for anyone who wanted to know where every hallway i didnt go down actually led to, and also so that i dont have to spend as much time describing my environments in the next and final chapter of this story

i mean it took me a legitimate WHILE before i finally found the last tape that i was looking for so as i spent my time meticulously killing all the killdrones in a given area and looking for this last tape + the ever important and useful bullets which came to plague my pockets even more than the cassette tapes, i had plenty of time to explore and mentally map these cells out

and actually in the meantime i managed to find three other tapes which were almost entirely complementary to every tape i had found before them so while im remembering them i may as well give you the lowdown on those first

one of them was actually a short guide on how to use your gun and switch out magazines and do basically everything the correct way with the firearm given to you but besides the fact that this tape referenced a users manual with diagrams and shit that i did not even HAVE i think it was describing a gun that was an entirely different model compared to trevor?

none of the details for the gun described in the tape matched up, including the presence of a safety which as we established quite a while ago was very much a thing that trevor entered my life entirely without

whatever the fuck trevor IS it definitely is not a "1911 a1" as described by the tape, not that that means anything to me anyway

seriously it was without a doubt the least useful tape i ever found and also the fucking longest so ill spare you guys + myself and just not even type it up

the other two i found however were at least vaguely informational and the first i found between them went like this

"you use technology to control physical things. similarly there is mindtech, which is used to control the boundless luminescence. mindtech can be used for good or evil. the threat has been using its mindtech as a weapon against you and so far has caused widespread sickness and mental weakness. now that you are in a helpless state they ready a crippling blow: mindkill. but they are aware that will not work on you. they have another potent weapon they will bring to bear against receivers called "the dreaming." they cannot exist fully in this reality, but they have been watching you and experimenting, and have developed this new mindtech. the dreaming is a bridge from our world to yours, and they will use this bridge to send specially conceived of weapons designed to work in your environment. these automatic weapons are designed to kill the few who survive."

so i mean thats cool i guess he just kinda describes what mindtech more or less is as a concept while also confirming that im in a dream in at the very least a ridiculously metaphorical sense

then theres the other tape

"a receiver is said to be "awake" when he is able to get a completely clear signal free of any subconscious corruption. in this state he will be able to see realities in their true form, and transcend normal human limitations. although some of the receivers we choose to speak to are advanced in their ability, no human has yet achieved this awakened state. humans exist in two worlds; in "reality b" they live and work in their shadow bodies. in "reality a" they are asleep, their minds unconcerned and roaming free, but humans have the unrealized potential to exist fully in both realities. it is for this reason that humans are threatened; if even one of them achieved an awakened state, they would see beyond the horizon of all known understanding."

and from this we can glean that at the time of me listening to these tapes apparently no one had done any better than i have so far

which im sure can be attributed to any number of unknown variables including but not limited to these tapes just being outdated as fuck

thats probably the case because i refuse to believe im the first human to have made it this far but since i have no proof for any legitimate theories on that lets just not even get into it

now as i was saying before i remembered these last tapes existed there are a limited number of cells ive come across in my travels and they repeat pretty fuckin blatantly

despite extensive searching i have only found ten different cells so honestly the ethereal threat behind this fake worlds construction was pretty fucking light on actually making a WORLD

maybe there were some budget cuts at evil hq like

"okay we gotta push the creation of the shadow world before the third quarter"

"uh but sir thats only one and a half quarters away"

"SHIT. youre right. alright well just do your best with what you have, these stupid fucking humans wont know the difference anyway"

"you got it sir"

"also dont call me sir anymore. call me... JANET"

and then the boss man rips off their suit to reveal a beautifully tailored ball gown and a bitchin long haired wig which tbh nobody was actually surprised by because this was the third time that week that their boss had called a board meeting for the main purpose of flamboyantly switching genders again

they did however all silently wonder how janet managed to fit this latest getup in under her suit with how magnificently poofy it is but since it was a trade secret no ones curiosity was satisfied and the boss stayed the boss

and thats basically a 100% accurate dramatization of why this fake world is so noticeably fake and terrible

anyway in no particular order im just gonna list off the cells i have found and give brief descriptions of their individual levels

first off theres the cell with the roof thats got like the oil tanks on it that you might remember. i described it as being dark because as it turns out it fucking was, even with michael carefully nestled betwixt my tender fucking lips. below this was an S-shaped green hallway, and below that is christmas lights james bond level looping hallway, the likes of which you may recall i originally woke up in

next we have the cell with the two roof bullshit, under which was this sort of industrial area that took up the middle and bottom levels all in one room and had a sort of C-shaped platform that only connects to the north middle level doorway, so you have to take a running leap if you want to go south

another cell would be this ritzy little number that had eight of those mushroom shaped little fan things on the roof, whatever the fuck those are even called, and also an absurdly complex water tower thing on the east wall with way too many pillars under it + a fucking HUGE air duct on the northwest side. under this is another middle-bottom shared room that was also set in an industrial setting and would have been two completely separate and totally unfurnished rooms if not for the gaping square hole in the middle of the bottom floors roof aka the middle floors floor aka the thin metallic landing separating the middle and bottom spaces aka round pillars dont fit in square holes so all the pillars holding this shit up were square

then theres the cell thats just completely empty except for a few lamps on the ground and some fucking stairs. like i shit you not thats all there was here, this place was practically made to torment me and me alone. they arent even GOOD stairs! they only go up to the top level on the north side so if you approach from the south at the top level you may as well go fuck yourself because its either jump off and break your spine from a 50+ foot drop or find another way down

anyway the only other cell that had all its doorways and levels in the same open outdoor space was the prison yard one and hopefully i dont have to describe that shit to you again

a close contender for all being outside was the cell i found with the walkway at the top level and three flights of stairs down to a pretty much flat level with a big pipe off to the side, under all of which is a completely inconsequential blue room which NO MATTER WHAT never had any fucking bullets or tapes inside. maybe ive just been really unlucky every time i searched one or maybe im mentally retarded but i have only ever found killdrones in this room so i either avoid it or just dash along the west wall from doorway to doorway because even if there are killdrones inside they generally cant get a good angle on you

one cell which i managed to entirely describe but on three separate occasions is the one with the pink meth crystal apartment at the bottom, the two level condo in the middle, and the regular apartment thats identical to the pink crystal apartment at the top. its one of my long running favorite cells actually because i have mastered jumping down from the top level balcony to the middle level upper patio balcony area, and while this has nearly killed me several times from how big the fall is and also how a turret was on the upper part of the middle level once the rush is pretty exhilarating i guess but well get more into my parkourlike exploits in the last chapter ok

the soapstone room with the shipping container carvings is of course another top level to a cell. the middle was the single floor apartment with the window and the long hall i described right before the end of the last chapter, and the bottom was this pretty interesting closed space which had a marvelously high ceiling and these walls that were basically ribbed for her pleasure + some pipes here and there so i mean it had a healthy number of genitalia and intercourse metaphors

finally i would like to describe two cells which confused me for the longest fucking time because they both had the same roof area

like seriously they baffled the fuck out of me because when i was trying to map out these cells in my head i thought the middle and bottom to this roof was just the room with the four boilers in the tetris s-block shape, but THEN i thought the middle was the expansive ass industrial room that generally just has aerial drones inside while the bottom was the room with the big blue pipe i have had to saddle on several separate sensual occasions

as it turns out this roof, which is basically a roof that "gets" me and tries to be there for me with all the amazing ramps it has in the place of any stairs, is the same for both of the cells with those lower sections

honestly im not even angry about this because again that roof is fucking amazing with the sick ramps it has and if i was still into skateboarding and maybe also actually had a skateboard with me i totally would have shredded the shit out of it

anyway thats pretty much every single place i ever went to and also every single place i COULD go to so there you go

there really isnt much left but to tie this up with a neat metaphorical bow so ill just do that with the next and final chapter

see you there i guess, assuming youre even still here anyway


	8. tape eleven + epilogue

so this is it i guess

the big finale to this little story that probably wasted an hour or two of your life

i mean assuming you actually decided to read through the whole thing, which honestly i wouldnt entirely blame you for not doing

although if you ARE the type of asshole who just skips to the end of stories to save time then i have no real respect for you either so its a moot point on how much of a shit i dont give

anyway since its about time that i try to be as succinct as possible without sacrificing the otherwise necessary elements this story needs to fundamentally remain a story i guess i better do that

here goes, but after the break so that itll be symbolic of me slipping into totally serious mode. i hope youre fucking ready for that unexpected twist of a thing thats about to happen but since you probably already saw the break with your peripheral vision i doubt itll be that surprising

* * *

now as the seriousness engines warm their cold and unused little metaphysical asses up im gonna address the fact that you are probably wondering a lot of things right now and i guess since im almost done here i might as well be as frank as possible with you about everything i can currently think of

like i bet some of you more skeptical sons of bitches are wondering how the hell ive managed to type all this up on my phone before its battery died

and honestly its a valid point of concern

my rebuttal is that im in shadow world dream land and if nothing is even real anyway except the amazingly high chances of death that have been surrounding my marginally competent ass from day one then my phone probably doesnt even realize that its not supposed to still be charged and neither does the fake as shit world around me

i mean hell my tapedeck hasnt run out of charge yet either and ive been listening to tapes on it almost entirely nonstop since the one tape that told me to so i feel like this is a valid theory

and then of course we have to question how my phone is even connecting to the internet if this is true, but given that we are both in a position where we can neither prove nor disprove each others existence or exploits and that i might as well be some unnamed asshole typing up completely fake bullshit while you might as well be a mere figment of my imagination, i can only assume im actually not writing this down anywhere and its just lost in the dreamscape of this world that only makes me THINK ive written all this down

still

i feel the need to capture my own story just in case there IS in any way a legitimate chance of it landing somewhere that people can read it, just so they will know that i was a dude who existed probably

now onto potential qualm number two

how could i possibly have survived this fucking long or done as many cool things as i have (as seen with those choice raps and the flying robots i killed within them) when i had absolutely no experience with a gun before any of this???

honestly its not like i can be educated on my own luck any more than you, and given that ive already told you that you are perfectly within your bounds to question whether this shit even fucking happened its basically not even a concern anymore

at this point you should be more concerned with whether the dubiously real shit youre reading about is entertaining and if not then honestly i have to wonder how you even made it this far

that said im just gonna assume that anyone still reading this still has at least a fading interest in everything ive written and just work on that assumption while i bring everything to a close

speaking of which the seriousness engines are primed and ready to go so we might as well ironically take that silly shit for a fucking spin here

to start with id like to bring your memory and attention back to when i said i was hunting for this last tape

that didnt stop being a thing that happened and it probably occupied far more time than it should have as i searched every nook and fucking cranny in every place i went more and more extensively

on the plus side i was careful and never let my guard down which means i never faced that much of a risk to my life

however it cost me hours upon hours of time as i made sure there was not so much as a spent bullet casing out of place everywhere i went

again this shit was tedious as hell but double again i said i was gonna give you the strider scoop on everything worth mentioning around here and like an honorbound ice cream man i intend to GIVE you that scoop + sprinkles if you cough up an extra half a dollar

and that means i have to make an embarrassing but totally necessary admission here

i got into parkour

honestly it was inevitable for a city slicker like myself to start running and jumping all around in this world thats basically a half city half industry environment

i never really took parkour seriously when i was in the "real" world because who could?? besides the fact that a lot of people gave it a bad name with the stupid jumps they would do over kneehigh obstacles whilst yelling "PARKOUR!!" aloud as if achieving fantastic orgasm there was not a lot of need for it because as a concept parkour basically revolved around the idea of literally running for your life in a given environment (which i only know because i googled it once and only once ok)

as you might understand if you are not fucking comatose this concept became much more relevant to me once i entered this deadly fake urbanish world and one which appealed ever more to me the longer i stayed here

it was ESPECIALLY appealing once i explored all these cells and felt certain that i had seen every one of them because then nothing could really surprise me anymore

like legitimately before i continued or finished my quest for that last cassette tape and after i had gotten literally every OTHER tape i just started running around in the cells i had already explored and cleared out

practiced jumping from place to place and climbing up or down ledges and even doing a few rolls and shit once i had practiced it

it took an ungodly amount of practice honestly and i very easily could have killed myself several times over just by landing some of the larger jumps wrong but i made sure to take it slow in the beginning

however there came a point where taking it slow just was not cutting the cake anymore which had actually come way back when i decided to BEGIN my parkourlike exploits because i was completely done with thoroughly searching my environments and being dependent on the bullets i found and used all over the place

i decided if i was ever going to find that last tape i might as well do it by strategically running past a variety of things that were trying to horribly murder my ass because somehow this seemed more efficient

i say somehow but to be perfectly honest it wasnt actually about efficiency and i might have been feeling a little suicidal and generally malcontent with the idea of taking things slow

obviously i wasnt explicitly trying to get myself killed because i still had a goal which could grant me life and i guess endless knowledge or whatever but i WAS shoving my upturned and exposed ass skyward to give every potential danger in a five mile radius around me a damn good look at my tempting virgin rump

no longer did i focus primarily on staying alive while these cassette tapes remained a secondary but longterm means of achieving this on the sidelines because now i had decided my life really wasnt worth that much i guess

its a little depressing i will admit that much

but it also was exhilarating as hell as i all but abandoned my gun and previous ideas of juniors first ubercautious self preservation tactics in favor of just running around shit and smoothly dodging everything that came my way like the skinny white american ninja every young urban boy secretly wanted to unironically be

fuck man i cant even begin to tell you how seriously i started to take some of this shit, like i began using all the dead or malfunctioning killdrones in the cells i had cleared as basically obstacle courses

i would just run past them and experiment with how good i was at staying out of their line of sight or skirting around them without giving them a clear shot at me

i already established that these dumb mechanized turrets were not good with moving targets and honestly neither were the flying ones so pretty much as long as i kept moving and never went directly towards or away from any killdrones nothing would be able to touch me

and once i felt ready that was it

i started heading north again

oh yeah! i never actually got around to mentioning it but like

do you remember the aerial drones that i just did NOT want to deal with two chapters ago?

i very absurdly compared them to bees so i would think they were pretty memorable

anyway from that point on i basically started only heading south for a while, which meant that i went through a lot of cells i had already been in but on different levels

and it was like this huge personal moment for me when i decided (pretty unreasonably if ill be perfectly honest) to head back and just dash through the room with those drones as an initial test of my parkour skills

it was pretty moronic because i mean all i had to do was run straight through that room (and i very simply did so)

afterwards however came the real challenge of avoiding literally every single killdrone waiting on the other side

which i guess means its time for one last rapping session for the ages so heres to hoping that this one doesnt fall flat

as the freerunners spirit raced within me

giving me a taste of sweet serendipity

i came at the world with a bold new outlook

where nothing i saw was jack shit in my book

killdrones on my left, and killdrones on my right

killdrones on the ground and already taking flight

deadly little robots with a penchant for murder

but not one of them could touch their citybred herder

over walls, across stairs, from edge to edge

these dangers werent squat, i can allege

and with every little pass these killdrones tried to make

i left them in the dust of my parkouring wake

(then if this was a fully funded production there would be like a twenty second instrumental solo while there are just shots of me running past turrets that are unleashing trails of bullets directly behind me and like maybe some flying killdrones that swoop in to try to taze my ass but inadvertently ram themselves into the floor because honestly theyre pretty clumsy. that has actually happened a few times, where they just accelerate towards me too much and then wind up shooting past me into a wall or something and just break on the spot. its pretty funny but ive never really been in a situation where i have time to slow down and appreciate it, but anyway thats about the end of the break so more raps ahoy)

with every bullet fired, and every tasers pop

i only ran by faster with little chance to stop

over roofs and underground, unholy beeps in the background

i never made a sound as these robotic chumps all clowned around

but with every big success i grew tireder and tireder yet

eventually forcing me to take a stand on my lifes debt

it wasnt easy ill tell you that, but with determination

i could turn around, trevor in hand, to start my extermination

because these killdrone turrets never took into consideration

the extent of their fuckups when they met bullet castration

one by one they all fell prey to what i could safely say

was nothing more than my own personal heyday

i want to keep rapping but i also feel like i shouldnt keep dragging this out so you know what, i think this is a good place to end it. its the last rap youre getting out of me so i hope you enjoyed them and also had your flu shots because otherwise youre in serious trouble after being exposed to that medically unsafe inferno

also to be clear tiredness was not the only reason i stopped and in fact i had a much bigger reason for stopping the single run i described here, wherein its generic likes paled in comparison to every single run i ever took

as it turned out i had caught sight of that fabled final cassette tape and had mad intentions to pick it the fuck up

the place where i found it was in the cell i described with the industrial middle + bottom and the C-shaped walkway

because i entered on the middle level i had originally planned to run all the way across the walkway so i could leap south (and yes this means i eventually turned south in my freerunning and parkour nonsense after i started it but sometimes turning around is the most logical course of action you have available when running from death itself)

however upon entering the room i saw that tape glinting in the light like a bar of goddamn gold but without all the obvious ideas about how heavy and generally not worth picking up this would make it

since there were turrets in this room but also a neat set of stairs to take me from the middle level to the bottom level i just had to pad out the finish to my run while they shot at me and honestly there came a point where i thought one of them HAD hit me

like once the bullets stopped flying as the turrets ran out of ammo and i realized that none of the aerial killdrones had made it through the doorway and were all still bumbling around outside i inspected my clothing and found a hole in the back of my shirt

but it wasnt like a "straight through" hole where something had actually hit my torso or anything because there was no blood

it was apparently from a moment where, as my shirt was flapping in the wind behind me, one of these ornery bastards actually shot through the billowing fucking fold of clothing that was trailing along at my back and inadvertently gave it TWO holes almost side by side

made for a pretty good physical representation of how close i had come to death and also of how i survived that encounter without even noticing the risks so i mean there are a lot of meanings to draw from this shit

that eleventh tape though, the fucking "cleartape"

i wanted to listen to that shit in some PEACE AND QUIET because if im not even SUPPOSED to hear the message the first time around then its gotta be something i really need to fucking focus on

so i just whipped out trevor and shot the batteries on all the turrets in here

none had any bullets left but they all kept chirping and beeping at me whenever i walked behind one of the pillars or raised platforms in here (of which there were several) and that was just plain annoying

and then... then it was just TIME i guess

i picked up that tape and popped it into franklin and pressed play real simplelike

but this time no soothing voice came to my ears

no esoteric messages about differing realities or metaphysical concepts like being a "receiver" or participating in "the dreaming" or anything

it was just this slight static that i couldnt even pick up on at first

i sat my ass down in the corner of the room where nothing could see me from any of the doorways and i listened and listened and then for some diversity KEPT ON motherfucking listening

i didnt know what the fuck i was listening for

i STILL dont

i just kept quiet and LISTENED because what else did i have to do??

not much, not until i decided to start biding my time with a distraction

in case it wasnt clear it was while sitting right here and just listening to this tapes otherworldly silence on repeat that i decided to pass the time by writing all this up

i dont know how many times ive listened to this thing in that time but for reference it always ends after about a minute of effectively giving me nothing, and i have been rewinding and replaying this tape all throughout the time i spent writing every single word you will see and have seen here before you

its got to have been AT LEAST a hundred times but all thats happened so far is that i have heard more and then less static

like thats it. first i could barely hear that static, then it was louder, and now its just gone entirely

i would imagine no static is good when im trying to get a "clear" signal but i still dont hear anything else

even now as i sit here and just noiselessly type this the fuck up on my phones tiny little touchscreen keyboard i do not hear one goddamned thing

although...

.....

you know what

its absolutely stupid and probably just some ignorance on my part but

i do not actually remember having my phone with me at any point prior to sitting down here

like im thinking back to every time i dug around for some spare bullets in my left pocket or fished for franklin outta my right

whenever i put some spare cassette tapes in either of my back pockets or occasionally a side pocket

but i dont remember having my phone during any of those times

fuck that is trippy to just not remember something like that

if it has anything to do with the tape im still putting on loop though i have no fucking idea what

im still here in this room so if i have crossed realities or suddenly gained the ability to see what i have not seen before then its a little less than immediately apparent

here i remain still listening to a silent tape that supposedly has a hidden message but that i just cannot fucking hear for some reason

maybe i AM fucking dreaming

maybe i went into a coma as soon as i started listening to this tape and thats why my phone is here, because my subconscious saw no reason not to give it to me as soon as i thought to pull it out

in my experience though its kind of hard to judge the whole of reality from a single vantage point

maybe i just gotta keep moving? just keep traveling through these cells until SOMETHING happens

physically traversing an environment doesnt seem that logical for transcendentally escaping it though

maybe...

maybe i just have to.....

remove my sunglasses?

it seems like the perfect metaphor for letting myself see shit more clearly

for all i know these pieces of plastic are actually dangerous to my eyes and mind somehow much like earths shitty media

hold on im gonna try this just give me like ten seconds worth of patiently waiting while you read over the following ellipses

...

...

...

...

...

...

yeah that didnt accomplish jack shit

it also probably didnt take you ten seconds to look down here but whatever waiting is always a stupid thing to make people do in writing anyway

so

i guess this is just fucking IT then

ive been stuck here for a while and despite the hours ive spent recording what is fundamentally "my" story it doesnt seem to be concluding itself

do you think that means that whatever undefined "threat" was out there actually got me?

like obviously thats a rhetorical question and i dont expect anyone to try to send me an answer somehow but

maybe they DID kill me a long time ago but my mind somehow survived so that it can just aimlessly fuckin wander

or maybe they mercilessly slaughtered the astral good guys who were trying to help me + any other humans with these tapes

or better yet those "good" guys never even actually existed

ive actually been thinking about this for a while but i wanted to save my most recent thoughts for this most recent metaphorical and also literal chapter about my life

because for all i know every single cassette tape was just totally bogus and a distraction from the same evil ambiguous motherfucker that sent me here and has been trying to kill me with what are actually pretty shitty little robots

a reason, if you will, for us dumbass humans to venture out into the deadly unknown rather than wait in the corners and recesses where no killdrones will easily find us

its something ive been more or less forced to consider because my only other obvious alternative is to follow that one tapes advice and legitimately listen to THIS tape one million fucking times

i dont know if it meant i could listen to any tape a million times or only this so called cleartape, or if all the times i listened to any of these tapes stacks up or WHAT

but according to my phones calculator its gonna take me almost two years of nonstop listening if i want to listen to this tape that much

and i guess thats kind of fair? if i DO take everything spilled at me from these tapes at face value then ive had every year i was alive as a measure of exposure to some corrupted fucking media

just under two years of mental rehabilitation compared to a little over twenty years of feasibly real sinister media nonsense is a more or less worthwhile trade

.....

im not sure i have the patience for it though

at least not for doing it while i just sit here and twiddle my fucking thumbs

maybe that makes me a spoiled piece of shit because for all i know my only goal here WAS just to listen to this one single tape a thoroughly ridiculous number of times

but if thats my escape i cant say i FEEL like its actually worth it

i dont even know what the fuck ill be escaping to

supposedly its another reality entirely and one thats simply BETTER than this one but whos to say thats even a thing that is true?

and that one tape said that every tape in this set was SPECULATED to be everything i need to know to wake up

what if their speculations were off???

what if they took a gamble with releasing these tapes as they are and it turns out that no human has yet made it the fuck out of this shadow reality because there just isnt enough knowledge or mental healing available for them in these tapes????

what if

well i mean shit

what if IM just too fucking broken or stupid for these tapes to work on me?

there are way too many possibilities here and basically none of them are in my favor

i busted my ass and also metaphorically sweat it the fuck off on an uncountable number of occasions and it is very possible that i did so for no legitimate reward at all

and thats kinda why i dont want to keep sitting around here listening to this tape

i mean sure ill still listen to it in the background but like

i wanna get OUT THERE and not just sit on my ass in some practical fucking hibernative state

and like, what if new tapes come out? what if ill only find them if i keep going?

i dont fucking know how those tapes are gonna be transported to this world but there have already been plenty, not to mention the bullets that are basically a plague on this shadow realm

my best bet seems like continuing on and just hoping that i either listen to this tape enough times as i go or finding a new set of tapes to transdimensionally eject my ass out of this purgatory hell place

either i WILL find something new or one of these killdrones will finally just kill me in the midst of me trying

and honestly

i think im okay with that

i could probably keep a digital journal here with like

every passing day of me listening to this fucking tape as i record what, if anything, i start to hear from it

but that kind of passive activity just isnt for me

if thats what it takes then someone else can stumble their ass upon this tape in their section of this lethal shadow world and take the fucking plunge

like if i gotta spend effectively two years in a world that isnt real im not going to fucking do it by sitting in the corner and just HOPING

thats a pretty inexcusably jank waste of my time

nah if i gotta stay here for that long then im gonna get out there and SEE what i can fucking SEE

maybe its nothing that i havent already seen before and maybe ill actually find the edge of the fucking world if i go far enough north

i honestly dont know but thats why i want to get out there and check for myself

ill still listen to this tape in the meantime i guess but

i would much rather achieve personal fucking salvation by doing something beyond waiting around

so i guess

i guess thats it??

thats my fucking epilogue for you. i am just going to head off into the fucking wilderness of these cells and never look back

if ill be honest i was actually kind of hoping that something would happen with this tape while i wrote all this out but i guess the fuck not

i dont get to end my story with a "oh shit im beaming up outta this dimension see you guys lat" where it just cuts off

i have to personally end this myself

so alright then

consider this shit nigh fucking ended

keep me in your prayers i guess

ask buddha or god or whoever you do or dont believe in to just look after some skinny white dude wholl be running and jumping and obnoxiously rapping about it to himself afterwards if he survives

sorry if you were expecting something more final than this but

i guess thats life for you

in case i ever get out of here and ascend to "reality a" and one of you also does or has done the same, keep your eye out for me yeah?

whatever metaphysical train station or central square people wake up in or suddenly appear at in that world

ill be the ruggedly handsomeish blonde dude with the bitchin shades that only faintly obscure how fucking lost he is

but in the mean time, thanks for reading i guess

this is david strider signing off, once and for all. its been a pleasure rambling and rapping for you


End file.
